NonLinear Love Story
by Rallalon
Summary: Come with me." She's worth it, he thinks. They fit so well together and she already knows how to use a fire extinguisher. MultiDoctor, Doctor/Rose
1. Chapter 1

I.

"That could have gone better," he says dryly, thumb idly stroking the back of her hand.

"Could've been worse," she replies, watching him instead of the building which was so recently in danger of exploding. When that smile touches her lips, the idle stroking becomes an intentional caress. "Shame about your coat."

They hadn't saved the world, only a town, only a few hundred people out in the boondocks, but that's not an _only_. That can never be an _only_.

He chuckles. "Could have been much worse," he agrees. "Barely singed."

"I'm glad," she says and he thinks she really is. It makes him glad too.

They stand in silence for a moment, waiting for the next word on a hilltop overlooking the fully functioning emergency generator. Three hours ago, he offered her a sweet and received a joyful laugh in return. Two hours ago, a town terrified of the dark was about to lose all sources of light. One hour ago, he was moderately on fire. Now, though, now they're hand-in-hand under a velvety purple sky. They've done well.

"Everybody lives," she adds, which is odd as there wasn't much danger of immediate death and destruction, only a light-worshiping culture on the verge of plunging into darkness. All the same, it's the perfect thing to say.

His smile grows as he watches her in the fading light of the sun, in the soft glow of the lamps built into the landscape. He can't place her time period and he's not entirely certain what planet she's from; he makes a mental note to ask later. "It's wonderful," he admits, leaning towards her.

"Fantastic," she says and then he kisses her, brushes his lips against hers.

She freezes, her tiny startled breath touching his face.

He pulls back and shakes his head. "I shouldn't have-"

"Yeah you should have," she disagrees and slips her free hand behind his neck. She squeezes his hand, never having let go.

He smiles.

.-.-.-.-.-.

They walk back into town very slowly. Every few steps, he ducks his head to press his lips to hers or she tilts her face up to receive what he's very willing to give her.

In the center of the town, the crowds recognize them instantly, two bipeds standing out immediately in a society of quadrupeds. The Anlosian people had been in danger of losing their power generator, the machine breaking down and needing repair in spots too small to fit their large, orange-striped bodies. The two bipeds had sought out one another immediately, taking action and working in quick unison, never stopping for introductions or simple greeting, only for exchanging shouts and yelled warnings, calling out readings and turning valves. They've simply met, just as they've simply started.

He thinks there might not be any stopping and he's too caught up in all of it to care.

They kiss and the Anlosians cheer, leaving a circle of space around them, a gesture that he tells her in murmurs is respectful. They laugh delightedly and kiss and kiss and kiss, just for the sound of it, for the flood of joy surrounding them. It's a victory song, it's a cry of thankfulness and for a moment, their public display of affection isn't at all sexual.

And then it is.

His tongue brushes her lips and she opens her hot mouth to his, one hand in his hair, the other gripping the back of his frock coat, the cloth more than simply singed in spots. She enters into his mouth, tongue running over teeth, and he wonders for a moment which one of them tastes more like the sweets from his pocket, decides it doesn't matter. His fingers splayed on her back, he pulls her closer, pulls her against him. She gasps and he chuckles from deep in his throat, a sound that goes unheard in the midst of the Anlosians' cheering. She grinds into him in retaliation and laughs when it's his turn to gasp.

"Let's take this somewhere private, yeah?" she asks, whispering into his ear.

He pauses, uncertain, and she kisses the side of his neck, sucks and nips and tastes. Everyone's still watching, still cheering. He should stop her, really he should, but after watching her, he's fairly certain that nothing can stop her today. Or perhaps any day, for that matter.

"I'm not human," he tells her, putting together the signs and assuming she must be. "Is that a problem?"

She returns her lips to his, a gentle touch, feather-light. He hovers on the edge of true contact before giving in, sighing into her mouth, sliding his tongue languidly against hers. Shifting, she presses the inside of her thigh against the outside of his, just a brush, just a hint of movement. His hands press into her back as he breaks the kiss, his eyes tightly shut as his breath hitches. "Is it?" she asks.

"Not a problem at all," he murmurs against her lips and takes her by the hand.

.-.-.-.-.-.

She climbs on top of him as if it's the most natural thing in the world.

He's not sure whether to admire her confidence or find fault with her gall. She's a pleasant lapful – and a handful, and a mouthful – so he goes with the former instead of the latter. When the kiss breaks, he's laughing, surprise catching up with him as all expectations of her sitting daintily across his lap are blown completely out of the water. They're both laughing, giddy and exhilarated, chests filled with the bubbly lift only infatuation can bring. Her legs wrapped around his waist, she circles her hips, giggles as he groans at the shifting friction of fabric between them.

"You don't laugh enough," she says and he wonders how she knows that. "You should."

He looks up at her and decides to give her the best night of her life. "Maybe I will," he says, speaking both to her and to his instinctual arrogance. The arrogance is the only instinctual aspect of himself that carries into this, into the wonderfully primitive play of bodies soon to begin.

His fingertips brush her cheek, her neck, the shell of her ear, all gently, so gently. She shivers, watching him from half-hooded eyes. That's a positive human signal, he's almost certain.

His hand trails down her side, stroking her skin though too much cloth. They're still dressed, still impossibly, completely dressed. Obviously on the same page, she pushes at his frock coat until he cooperates, gets him down to vest and shirt.

Arrogance deserts him, leaves him momentarily floundering in the confusion of what he's supposed to be doing. Her hand taking his, she guides him to her breast, cups his hand around her and his tongue stalls in her mouth. He pulls back, but she speaks before he can.

"I've never done this before," she admits, speaking to his cravat, smoothing his vest over his shoulders. "Never took a bloke to a hotel just to shag him, never hooked up for a one-nighter, never . . . wanted to." She looks into his eyes with something more than lust and part of him wonders who exactly she thinks she's sleeping with.

"I…" It's an effort for him; it's a trial and she knows it instantly, knows it and leans forward and nuzzles his neck. It makes it easier to talk even as it's harder to think, not looking at her face.

"Yeah?" she asks, breathing him in, shifting her weight on his lap. He rocks up against her through too much cloth, slow and subtle and it makes her sigh.

He does it again, again, still gentle, still controlled until her hand tugging on his hair tells him not to. Or maybe tells him something else entirely. "I don't often," he tries to say, tries to continue and add more but she already knows he doesn't mean one-night-stands with random aliens. He can tell, though he's not sure how he can tell, how she can know. "I haven't in…"

"Something else you should do more, yeah?" she says, pressing a kiss below his ear.

He relaxes against her slowly and the hand not on her breast bravely ventures towards her shapely bum. Very shapely. "Or some_one_," he counters after a moment, a playful note reemerging in his voice. It sounds like a flirt, could be, could be more. Maybe she wants it to be more; maybe he should make it more. He wishes he knew what he was doing instead of simply what he wanted to be doing.

She presses against him, her arms around his neck. "Maybe you will," she replies with no shortage of cheek, bringing them back around to the beginnings of their conversation.

"Only maybe?" he asks, asks like he's joking but his arms give him away, tense and careful and afraid. After their efforts together today, he's certain this isn't a trap, that she isn't. This wasn't plotted by someone who wants him dead, couldn't have been. The Master is dead, the Rani imprisoned; he's having difficulty running though the rest of the list at the moment, but he's sure enough that this human woman isn't on it.

It's half from his time senses and half from his hearts and it's nigh impossible to doubt someone who believes in him so completely, who immediately and naturally trusts him. Quite the team they were, today.

"Dunno," she replies, grinning at him. "Sort of depends on how naked you're planning on getting."

"Ah, yes," he says, hands finding the hem of her hoodie. "That would be the natural next step, wouldn't it?"

She shifts on his lap, her hot weight pressing against the tops of his thighs. "Mm, more or less, yeah."

He steals her mouth for a kiss, unable to resist that smile with her tongue on teasing display. "I vote for more," he murmurs against her lips.

When she smiles again, he can feel it. Nimble fingers toy with the buttons of his vest, undo the first one and pull at the fabric. "I vote for less," she counters.

Such a cheeky little thing he'd found. He's grinning as he tells her, "I find myself overruled."

"I like you better _under_ruled," she counters with a roll of her hips, with a pleased giggle to his gasp.

"Ah . . ." he says, speaking into her shoulder. "I . . . I might be in favor of it myself."

She grins at him as if he's just said something completely clever. He hasn't, not at all, and yet it fails to matter. She's diving into all of this with an enthusiasm he can't help but match, couldn't try to resist.

Something occurs to him. "You haven't even asked my species," he says, which is less embarrassing then telling her that he never did catch her name.

"Not biologically compatible enough for accidents, yeah?" She asks it as if she's only checking, like she already knows the answer.

He looks at her curiously, left in wonder at her unlikely mixture of idiocy and trust. "You're not even going to ask what I am?" he marvels.

She bites her lip, trailing her hands down from his shoulders. Her hands press over his hearts, but she doesn't so much as blink, only smiles. "Cool skin, two hearts . . . Bet you're going to say you're a Time Lord," she teases.

"I _am_ a Time Lord!" he protests.

She only giggles, only beams at him. He's offended and somewhat confused and then she's kissing him again. "You're sweet," she tells him, as if that's a fair substitution.

He means to try to explain to her, means to let her know how his claim is a statement of reality. He means to. He doesn't. Not with this delightfully mystifying woman on his lap, not with her pleased kisses taking away his words. Her fingers toy with his cravat and when her expression of intense concentration becomes too much for him, he unties the strip of silk himself, tries to.

"Let me," she tells him, asks him. She explains as he raises an eyebrow, mystifies him once more. "S'like unwrapping a present."

She blushes as she says it, actually blushes. This human woman who has straddled him and begun undressing him with next to no preamble – now she blushes.

"Well then," he says, not knowing what else to say, what else to do besides kiss her.

She divests him of his neckpiece, unbuttons vest and shirt and really, he should be doing something of this sort to her in return. His neglect doesn't raise comment, doesn't earn even the slightest rebuke. She pushes his shirt off of his shoulders and he rids himself of it quickly, the sleeves still through his vest.

Her fingers trace over his chest in what feels more like a cursory check than a caress. "You really didn't get burned," she says and it takes him a moment to realize what she's talking about. The Anlosian power generator, the fire, his jacket burning; that's what she means.

There's a look in her eyes he hasn't seen in a long time.

"You were worried?" he asks and to his own ears, he sounds surprised.

"Maybe a little," she admits.

"A little?" He's not sure what he wants her to say, whether he wants confirmation or another one of her teases.

She doesn't seem to know either. "Mm."

One more question, just one to save the mood. Just one because he might be just a little impressed with her as it is. "Where'd you learn how to use a fire extinguisher like that anyway?"

She grins. "Oh, I know a guy. Amazing what you can do with a fire extinguisher."

A sway of the hips, a squeeze of the legs, and respiratory bypass or no, he nearly chokes on air. "The way you say it, it's completely filthy."

"You've got a dirty mind, s'all," she explains, that tease back in her voice. "An' I can prove it."

"Really now." He means to sound skeptical, finds himself curious.

She takes her top off, removes her bra.

"Ah," he says and when she laughs, they bounce. "Point taken."

It's a bit of a blur after that, his mind reaching forwards in time to when he wants to be. They get up so he can readjust the bed, a hotel room built for quadrupeds needing a few tweaks for their comfort. His hands shake on the lever and the mattress crank and he can't seem to operate even this simple piece of machinery. He wishes he could blame it on lack of light, but no piece of Anlosian architecture will allow for shadow, let alone darkness; there isn't so much as a light switch.

She saves his ego and gives him the perfect excuse for his inability, wrapping her arms around him from behind, unbuttoning his fly. Her breasts press against his back, her lips teasing his neck. "S'okay," she murmurs. "You can leave it like this. Bed's flat enough."

"Such impatience," he tries to chastise and then she takes him in hand.

"You're one to talk," she replies and that's not fair, that's really not fair at all. His snappy comebacks refuse to snap. His witty rebuttals have been outwitted.

She strokes him the right way from behind, fingers ghosting then palm sliding, tip to base but not back down, not the way that sends instinctual warning bells blaring in his mind. It's at one erotic and reassuring, the motion replicating entrance into her again and again, forever without once withdrawing.

His head thrown back, neck too weak to support it, he groans. "You've done this before."

She nuzzles at his ear, sounds almost amused. "'M not a virgin, y'know."

"That's, ah . . . That's not what I-" He stops her hand, turns in her arms to pointedly tug at the waistband of her jeans. "That's not what I meant."

"Then what do you mean?" she asks without needing to, that unexpected knowledge of hers behind her eyes. He'd know if she were reading his mind, really, he would and he can't feel anything of the sort. It seems a pity, seems like it wouldn't be right to be inside of her body without her inside of his mind. She's broadcasting familiarity, impossible as it is, and so the mental contact doesn't seem like too absurd of an idea.

He helps her with her jeans and she shimmies out of them, nearly making him lose his train of thought. "Been with a Time Lord," he says, even though he knows she couldn't have been. Unbidden, the memory of the Master violating Grace's mind and mouth rises to the front of his mind. A sudden possessiveness seizes him and he doesn't so much snog her as lay a frighteningly savage claim.

She melts against him, presses up against him, soft and willing and just a little his. Strange, that she would melt when it's her who's burning, human-hot and shivering at his touch. Pulling her back towards the bed, onto the bed, she climbs back onto his lap in a way he wouldn't mind getting accustomed to.

"Call it a non-linear love story," she tells him, gives him words he can't hope to process as she takes him inside of her.

His mouth falls open and his head falls back, presses into the pillow. He barely has time to try to cope with his inability to hold her from the inside, his member flaring and swelling and unable to find purchase in her slick heat. His hips rock upwards, desperately pressing him inside of her, and she takes the motions and plays them into a rhythm of her own making.

By the time she lets him speak, he's nearly forgotten what they were talking about. "Do you have some rule against making sense in bed?" he asks her, dazed, pulling her down by one shoulder for a kiss, his other hand kneading her bum encouragingly. The change of angle puts a tremor into his voice, into her body.

"Only with you," she tells him, putting her hands on either side of his head, locking her arms to look down at him. Her hair falls into his face and he puffs out his cheeks, blowing the strands up playfully, his fingers lightly tracing her sides. She shifts her weight to one arm, tucks her hair behind her ears one-handed. His tempting caress turns into a poke without warning and he grins as she shrieks a laugh, grunts as she collapses on top of him. He rolls them over, careful, so very careful to stay with her, inside of her. He presses his weight down on her, holds her to the bed as if to be absolutely certain she won't leave before they're through.

No chance of that. No chance of that at all.

His forehead against hers, his eyes flutter as his breath comes out in small desperate gasps laced with meaning, half-spoken words pressed to her lips. His eyes fall shut and his mouth falls open as she does something strange and new and wonderful and he's never been so fond of her species. She claims his mouth, taking control of the kiss and so much more with her hand at the base of his neck.

And that's her making those noises, that's got to be her making those noises. It couldn't possibly be him. Not him. His mouth is straying from hers, pressing a kiss below her ear, on her jaw, anywhere he can reach; his cries and gasps are lost in her hair or maybe she can hear him; maybe she can hear the way his murmurs are turning into a broken narrative that means only one thing, only _now now now now now oh please let it always be now_.

"Oh god, please…" That's her now, her voice her words her mouth her meaning escaping him. Her legs wrapped around him, she squeezes, clenching as he grinds into her, pulls him in deeper, undulating heat breaking against him in a constant wave. "I'm- I'm… I need- Oh god, Doctor, please!"

"Anything," he murmurs into her collarbone between openmouthed kisses to her skin. "Anything." He flares inside of her as he says it and she grinds her hips against his until his reply is a promise repeated with each movement, until he's losing himself inside of her, panting and straining and not quite reaching.

She turns his head and he remembers that kissing is good, kissing is very good, all lips and tongue and teeth meeting and sliding and sucking and savoring. Her hand finds his and he entwines their fingers immediately, palm pressed to palm. Feeling each callus, each and every line of her blazing skin with his elevated senses and excited nerves, he gasps or she does. She does, all clenching and squeezing and human-hot in a way he's never known before and he could forget himself in this, in them. Quite happily, he could do that.

"Together?" he asks between peppering her face with kisses. "Or you -" kiss "- can -" kiss "- yes -" kiss "- you first and I -" kiss "- I watch you." It's important, suddenly yet infinitely important, the sight of her and him in her, a tiny glimpse of an ephemeral _them_.

She catches his lips to stop his tongue, guiding his hand down between them. It feels clumsy and awkward, but she doesn't pull away and he can only be thankful. "Together," she tries to say and can't quite manage. Maybe he does something right or maybe he does it all wrong, but whatever he's doing, it barely allows her to speak. Let it be right.

He knows he's fumbling, knows any human male would have sent her off over the edge by now, but he's trying and he doesn't know what he's looking for, what he's feeling for. A kiss works for compensation until she cries out, clutching him to her, and he rides out a moment of terror until he can make out what she's saying, until he realizes that he hasn't hurt her after all.

Her legs tighten around him and he tells her, his voice a low rumble that sounds nothing like him, "I want to watch."

"Next time," she tells him, a keening cry that only sounds like a promise, only sounds like one because that's as close as it will ever get.

He wants more than that.

He's flaring inside her, completely flared inside her when he pulls his lips from her ear, when he looks at her, nearly cross-eyed from being so close, needing to be so close. She might know what she's said or she might imagine she does or he might be beyond caring. He is, when she looks back at him like that.

Focusing, adapting, learning what she needs as he gives it to her, it fails to be enough and he struggles through the mire of his own mind. They're hovering on the edge, hanging there together when all he wants is to send her over and follow right after, hand in hand, legs twining and tangling in blankets until there's no hope of separation ever again. His want for her is as absurd as it is irrational, as irrational as it is beautiful.

"Next time," he repeats. He's possessive and she's his because he says so, because he will say so, will always say so and already, he knows she's the best mistake he'll ever make. There's only so long he can keep that in mind, only so long he can pause and dwell before it's impossible. She's gazing up at him with dark, wanting eyes and he can't think, can't hope to, not when he's buried inside her and shaking to hold still when all she wants is for him to move with her. He wants that to be all she wants.

It might be. Because he's a madman, or because she's abandoning sanity for him or because of the six simple words she breathes to shatter his control in a way no human – no being of any sort has ever been able to before.

"And the time after that, too."

He breaks at the promise in her eyes, in her voice, in the way she holds his head as he bites down where her neck becomes shoulder, bits and licks and sucks and oh yes, this is going to leave a mark. He's grinding into her, no finesse, no technique, nothing but a claim he's desperate to make and she's clutching at him, his back, his neck, clinging to him like there's nothing else left, like there's nothing but him, like there'll never be anything else but him ever again.

She comes with a shout, short fingernails scraping his skin and he tries to watch her face, really he does, he tries yet he can't, not with her holding him so desperately, not with his face buried in her shoulder, not with her scent flooding his mind. He rocks into her and it's all enough to send her over again, to take them over together and they're falling, they're falling together and it's the best thing there's ever been because they could fall forever but they've already caught each other.

.-.-.-.-.-.

She's really quite snuggly. It makes the wait more comfortable, makes him less impatient for her to wake.

Bundled up in the sheets, she cuddles into his side, cheek resting on his shoulder. He'll be restless soon, knows he will be, but as for now, it's enough to simply lie there and watch her sleep, listen to her heart beating so slowly, so strongly, listen to her breathing. He finds that her eyebrows don't match her hair, so much darker that the shoulder-length strands must be dyed. Gently brushing her hair out of her face leads to an exploration of her features, the pads of his fingertips ghosting over the swell of her cheek, the bridge of her nose.

He studies her, studies the way her eyes squeeze shut and her nose scrunches when he comes close to waking her, studies the way her lips quirk as he pets her hair and smoothes it down. He imprints her upon his memory, forges a memory so sharp that time cannot dull it.

And he wonders.

Her eyes open before his patience runs out. She seems almost surprised and he's suddenly very glad he hasn't left this bed. She seems like him in this moment, seems and might be. He wants to ask, wants to skip ahead to the question he wants to ask, dreads to ask.

"Hello," she murmurs quietly, a smile touching her lips as she stretches a bit, as she untangles herself from the blankets enough to wrap an arm around him. He burns and she shivers and they both make a noise that ends much better than it started.

"Hello," he replies because that feels like the thing to say. Even at this point, he's still following her lead and he still doesn't mind.

"You're still here," she tells him as if just realizing this fact, smiling through the haze of sleep.

Really, he has no choice but to kiss her.

"Mm, I am," he replies once they're done, once she's half on top of him and looking slightly chilled. "Seems a little rude, leaving without a word."

She looks at him seriously, raises herself up on her arms to look at the top of his head. With the view this allows him, he's not about to complain or question, simply raise his head to kiss and suck languidly at the skin of her chest. He stops what he's doing when she asks him an unexpected question.

"What colour would you say your hair is?"

He drops his head back onto the pillow to stare up at her. "Pardon?"

"Your hair colour," she repeats, her fingers in said hair. "It's not all the way brown, not really ginger, sort of reddish . . . Is there a word for that?"

"Chestnut?" he offers, not seeing what this has to do with anything.

She seems to think it relevant, but for what reason, he cannot hope to fathom. "Chestnut and not rude," she concludes, nodding at him as if this is somehow important. "Food and manners."

"You really do have some rule against making sense in bed, don't you?" he asks her again.

"Only with you," she answers for the second time this night.

They smile at one another and he searches for something to say. In the end, he rolls over to fish for his jacket off the side of the bed. Finding the velvet by touch, he pulls it up, rummages through his favorite pocket.

"Jelly baby?" he offers, holding the white paper bag out to her.

She laughs and takes one. "Post-coital sweets. Now who doesn't make sense in bed?"

"Still you, I'm afraid," he replies and he has the horrible feeling that he's already gone and gotten himself attached. "For instance," he adds, watching her carefully as she pops the sweet into her mouth, "I don't recall telling you my name."

She stops chewing. It's always a telltale sign, when they stop chewing.

"And you knew I was a Time Lord before I tried to tell you," he continues, doing nothing more than speaking, simply lying where he is and talking to her in a very calm and collected voice. His eyes don't drift to the mark he's made where her shoulder meets her neck. They certainly don't try to wander, not at all. "Not to mention how very much in stride you're taking our differences in biology."

She moves and he only watches, watches as she swallows, watches as she leans over him and presses a kiss to his lips. There's no denial; she's even vaguely flustered now. "You're right," she says, pulling away: "I don't make sense out of bed either."

It occurs to him to catch her hand, to stop her, to do something to prevent her leave-taking. It occurs to him, yet he doesn't move. She dresses and still he simply watches, feels his hearts fall painfully out of sync as she hides herself from him.

She pulls her trainers on and he plays the only card he has, a card still unfamiliar to him. This is a good body, he knows, a body strong and attractive. He uses his face and his arms and this voice which is so much better than his last one, uses them all and still knows he will fail.

"Come with me."

Dispelling the serious mood he's straining to sustain, she grins slightly, tongue peeking out between her teeth for all of a second. "Thought I already did," she replies, teasing just that little.

"We could do that some more, too," he offers. In reality, he wants to insist upon it. "But I mean that. Come with me." He's traveled with people who have kept secrets from him, even journeyed with a few supposed to kill him. She's worth it, he thinks. They fit so well together and she already knows how to use a fire extinguisher.

His words make her pause, draw her back to the bed. He likes to think that's the reason, likes to think that some of his unseemly influence on this universe is an influence on her.

She cups his cheek in her human-hot hand and kisses him with a sense of finality. "I meant that, too."

He stands, wishes he were taller again. "You're not going to tell me your name, are you?"

"Not when I've already told you," she says and he can't imagine how that simple contradiction could feel so significant.

"When?" He doesn't know her time period, but he can guess her planet. He knows a London accent when he hears one, thinks he's thinking of the right London.

"Not yet," she tells him and something in her eyes tells him that she's seeing a different face. She turns from him, crosses to the door.

"Will I love you?" he calls after her, jumbling his pronouns as her hand touches the door handle. He can't think, can't move, can't care that all of his clothes are still on the floor.

She smiles at him over her shoulder, bright and shining and mystifying and fantastic. "Don't you already?"

She walks out of his life and into his future.


	2. Chapter 2

II.

Three years, one month, two weeks, six days, twenty-one hours, eighteen minutes and thirty-three seconds later, he meets her in a bar.

His hearts separate, fly in two directions, one lodging in his throat and the other sinking into his stomach. She doesn't see him, and he dares to hope that she doesn't know him yet.

It could be now.

She's sitting at the bar, patrons on either side of her, and really, he can't be certain it's her, not with her back turned to him, but it feels like her, feels like another fantasy of her. Any second now, she'll feel his stare and turn and become another woman with her blond dyed hair but without her tongue-touched smile.

After telling his companion to get back to the TARDIS eventually, he sits on the other side of a man who's trying to chat her up, takes the closest available barstool and looks into the mirror behind the counter. Bottles and cans and pretty glass structures are arranged on multi-layered shelves, all in front of a shining reflective surface that would make lesser mortals dizzy in combination with the lights.

Moving his head, he can almost make out her face, can almost see her eyes behind a bottle of hyper-vodka. It's difficult to tell and really, it would be much simpler just to tap her on the shoulder, but he's already been doing that for three years, one month, two weeks, six days, twenty-one hours, twenty-one minutes and forty-nine seconds. He's had enough of that, of interrupting and trying to explain why.

The man between them keeps waving his hands and even from this angle, he can see that the fellow's facial scales are turning a lusty orange as he leans forward, probably claiming that he needs the proximity for his internal ears.

The Time Lord orders his drink with a calm voice and refrains from kicking the man in the shins. He'd only hurt his foot, if he's thinking of the correct species. He's almost – not quite, but almost willing to take that risk.

The fellow asks her for a dance and a voice he's imprinted irrevocably onto his mind replies, "Could you maybe switch seats with me instead?" The music is loud but not loud enough to confuse his ears. Nerves he hadn't thought he had come to life, send a heady mixture of excitement and fear through his body.

"Sssure thing, gorgeousss," the man hisses and the urge to run combines with the urge to kick the man. With his legs confused, he simply sits there, the man moving away to reveal her.

She smiles at him, hopping over to the recently occupied stool as the scaled fellow takes her seat in the assumption that this is some sort of mating ritual. "Much better view from here," she announces before taking his cravat in hand to snog him hello.

Needless to say, the reptilian man leaves.

This is not a fact that is noticed or taken into account for forty-eight seconds. And two thirds.

She breaks for air, her forehead pressed against his, the glorious scent of her flooding through him, perfectly distinct amid the smells of the establishment. Her strong, powerful heart beats so slowly under his hand and he reminds himself that this is a very quick speed for a human. He imagines her heartbeat will always frighten him, the pauses between so unnaturally long as if the next might never occur.

They've both turned on the barstools and if he were in a saner state of mind, he might be appalled at how quickly he's pressed his knee between hers, driven her legs apart. There's something wrong with him, something incredibly wrong with him and he's utterly unwilling to admit that it's her. She's not wrong at all. Frustrating and impossible and not where she should be – which is on his lap, he likes to think, or at least in his TARDIS – but wrong? Never.

The motions of her breathing press her breast into his hand or maybe it's completely deliberate on her part or maybe it's really just because he can't not touch her.

"Hello," she says, kissing him again.

"Hello," he answers, dizzy, pulling back so he won't fall off of the stool. He's been spun by world after world, hurtled through stars and flung through time, but it's being in her orbit that has him unbalanced. He remembers himself enough to realize that he has no idea what to say and so resorts to his default: "Jelly baby?"

She looks at the bag in his hand and laughs, a peal of joy that resounds in his ears until he realizes that this is the wrong paper bag. Shoving the packet of spare parts into his pocket, he makes a mental note to start using his toolbox again and not store confusing bags in his coat.

He gets the bag right this time and she takes one with a smile, holding the orange sweet between her fingers with a considering expression. It's not the reaction he was expecting, not the reaction he usually gets from Londoners. Usually, it's the non-Londoners who get confused, people like Leela who assume the sweets are literally jellied babies.

Instead of popping the sweet into her mouth, she raises it to his lips. He accepts it, sustaining eye contact and admiring the flush of her cheeks, adoring her audacity all the more for her awareness of it. Orange for lust, he thinks and samples the pad of her thumb with a flick of the tongue, kisses the digit pressed lightly to his lips.

Her other hand tangles in his hair and his highly intelligent brain makes a guess as to what's going on as she kisses him, encourages his mouth to open. He passes the sweet back to her, well aware that he will never again be able to eat another without thinking of her. Maybe just the orange ones, if he's lucky.

He wonders if he wants to be unlucky.

Releasing him, she chews thoughtfully. He picks up the tumbler that has appeared at his elbow, sips the liquid contained within it without knowing whether or not if it's what he ordered, let alone when the drink arrived. They swallow at the same time and he can't help but ask, "Does it taste better like that?"

She blushes and once again he wonders at her boldness. "It does, actually," she replies.

"Who was that?" he asks, nodding in the direction he assumes the scaled man must have left.

Shrugging, she replies, "Dunno. Some random alien."

"And I'm not?" he questions, needing to know. He remembers everything she's said, everything she's told him and it's impossible. Perfectly impossible and he wants it so badly that words fail him. Thousands of languages at his disposal, but the only words he's interested in hearing are the ones coming from her lips.

__

"I've never done this before," she'd said. _"Never took a bloke to a hotel just to shag him, never hooked up for a one-nighter, never . . . wanted to." _It wouldn't be the worst lie he's ever been told, only the best truth he's had to surrender. He wants it to be true, just for him, only ever for him.

"You're a very specific random alien," she tells him and touches his face. "I didn't love that bloke at all."

"Oh," he says, cheek warmed by her palm. He can't hear the chink of his glass as he sets it upon the counter, can barely hear her over the poor excuse for music.

"Plus you have hair," she adds, that twist of humour he remembers resurfacing.

"Chestnut," he agrees, says it because it made her happy before, because it might make her kiss him again. He's a genius after all, so it's no real surprise when he's right.

"Dance with me?" she asks and it astonishes him, the way she seems to think he might say no.

He looks out into the crowd of humanoids, watches the shifting mass of grinding bodies, the couples and trios and groups breaking apart and reforming and touching without specific purpose. He decides he likes specific, a good thing for a very specific random alien to like. The music's awful, too, all New Era techno. His companion catches his eye from the horde of the horny, gives him a gesture that either means "Good pick" or "Take her from behind." He frowns in return and isn't taken seriously; it's a mutual sort of irreverence they have for each other. Overall, the establishment is not a place he wants to be, he'll readily admit, but he's grateful indeed he allowed himself to be dragged here.

"Not to this," he tells her and takes her hand. "I've something better in mind."

Only when she puts down a coin of the local currency on the counter for him does he remember that he's forgotten to pay and by then it's too late. "You paid at the hotel," she reminds him, mouth close to his ear as they navigate the crowded building, making a none-too-subtle beeline for the exit. "I can at least buy you a drink."

"Who bought you yours?" he can't help but ask her.

"A very specific random alien," she replies, then kisses his neck. "Don't worry: he wasn't ginger."

He is at once confused and bizarrely reassured. And then he's simply confused. "There you go again," he tells her, his hand on the small of her back as he escorts her out the door. "Not making sense."

"I don't make sense anywhere," she answers cheekily, her arm around his waist, hand dipping into the back pocket of his trousers. It's a lie, of course, but perhaps she doesn't know it is.

She makes perfect sense here, really she does. Right here, with his arm around her under an unfamiliar sky. Right here, pressed against him with enough trust to break him, break him so gently that the pain can only be described as exquisite.

He leads her to the TARDIS and watches her face when she sees it, when she recognizes his ship, his home. There's so much she's trying not to let him know, so much he imagines he knows already. "This is my timeship," he tells her needlessly.

Seeming to see something in his eyes that he didn't mean to put there, she stalls, asks, "You're not taking me anywhen, are you?"

The thought is one that has visited his mind more than once, tempted him utterly. "Just here," he promises. "Just now."

He unlocks the door, takes her hand, and brings her inside his third heart.

Her eyes light up as she looks, human curiosity turning her head. He wonders what she expected, sees that this isn't it. The eternal hum changes, shifts to suit their guest and he knows immediately the extent to which she will one day belong here. The extent to which she does already.

"You didn't say it," he marvels, the suspicions confirmed and the Time Lord bewildered.

"Say what?" she asks, turning to him, swinging their hands between them.

"That it's bigger on the inside," he clarifies.

She looks around, thoughtful consideration clear not in the lines of her face but the curves, in the way her lips move and her eyebrows rise. "It's sort of obvious, isn't it?"

In that instant, he loves her so much that he's afraid there isn't enough room between his hearts to fit her.

He knows it and he also knows that he's never been good with gestures. Fortunately, the TARDIS is, dimming the lights for him and turning on the newly installed sound system. He hadn't known she could do that and there's a moment of pain as he misses his broken record player.

The music is a Strauss – a cliché, he knows, but for good reason – and he turns his hand in hers. "Will you?" he asks, attempting manners and dignity and trying so hard to impress.

"You waltz?" she questions, almost insultingly skeptical.

It's not the reaction he was aiming for. "I waltz," he confirms, gathering her in his arms. "Very well."

She smoothes the fabric of his frock coat over his shoulder, rubs the velvet both ways before resting her hand there. "I don't know how," she admits, nervous with him for what he hopes is only the first time.

"I'll teach you," he promises and they both pretend he's only speaking of dancing.

They move together and he almost likes it better like this, the way she stumbles against him and uses him so naturally to support herself, the way their legs tangle and chests collide, the way she laughs when the mood of the piece changes from pensiveness into joy. She catches on soon enough, or she almost does.

"Stand on my feet," he tells her and she does, her arm around his neck, her hand in his. He tightens his arm around her waist and whirls them about in a way a human his size would be hard-pressed to manage. As expected, as hoped, this display doesn't frighten her, merely delight her – if "merely" could apply to this, to her body fitting against his, to her joy spilling over into the sound of her, the scent of her.

She asks into his ear, warm breath giving him shivers, "What's this song?"

"Rosen aus dem Süden, originally," he replies. "A Johann Strauss waltz. Not the best recording of it. Of course," he adds, "nothing can really compare to opening night." He lets her down, leads the dance properly and immediately misses her heat. She's blazing, always blazing.

Her eyes are so close to his, her mouth tempting his admittedly poor impulse control. Those eyes crinkle around the edges; her mouth turns up in a playful smile. "Are you trying to ask me out on a date?"

He raises his eyebrows. "What do you think this is?"

"A seduction," she replies simply and he can only laugh, laugh until he's dizzy with the feel of her.

"I suppose you would know," he murmurs into her hair.

She pulls back, looks up at him in a way he thinks might be offended. "You saying I seduced you?"

"Not at all," he replies, smiling softly, stroking her back gently. "Several very irritated individuals with sinister ulterior motives have assured me quite emphatically that I am seduction-proof."

"'Course you are," she says and does something very deliberate with her thigh. If her smile weren't proof enough, this certainly feels as if he's forgiven. "What about my sinister ulterior motives?"

"You mean the ones I cunningly tricked you into revealing just now?" he asks and kisses her smile.

"Yeah," she replies when he lets her. "You're so impressive like that."

"I am," he agrees, spinning her a little faster as the song draws to a close. It goes against the beat, just a little, but it pulls her against him.

"You're so full of it!" she laughs, forcing him to either snog her or make quite the crude remark. Personally, he enjoys the snogging more, even if the unsaid remark was quite witty.

Breathless is a look that suits her, which pleases some instinctually male part of him that he isn't supposed to have. Her eyes are blissfully closed, her lips parted for air, and when he leans in to murmur his question into her ear, she very nearly answers.

"Who are you?"

Her fingers tightening in his hair, the beat of her heart changes, hastens. "Me," she replies.

"How very concise," he says, still using his murmur against her skin, still attempting the completely unfamiliar with this woman. Maybe this is a seduction after all.

He can hear her smile as she asks rhetorically, "Aren't I?"

It's not a question he answers, not one he needs to, the change of song supplying a slight change of mood. She senses the shift in him the way she seems to be able to sense all changes in him. He wonders all the more at her for it, is at once frightened and delighted to be so known.

"I need a name for you," he tells her seriously.

"I'm your very specific random alien," she replies, somehow equally serious in tone if not word choice.

He chuckles, liking the first two words best. There's such possibility in them. "That doesn't quite seem as if it would roll off the tongue during climax."

She draws back enough to look at him and he realizes that they've stopped moving for the most part, they're simply standing and holding and he doesn't know how long they've been like that. "Are you propositioning me for sex?" inquires the woman who shoves her tongue in his mouth instead of saying a simple hello.

"I'm asking for something to call you," he corrects, interpreting her obtuseness as a teasing attempt at stalling. "I don't need your name, simply something you respond to."

"So says the Oncoming Storm?" she asks and he tells himself he should stop being surprised at her.

"So says the Oncoming Storm, yes," he replies. "And Time's Champion. And Merlin."

The last one makes her look as if she's sorely tempted to comment and yet she doesn't. He wouldn't have minded if she did, though. Not at all. Instead, she considers, wonders. "I've been called the Valiant Child," she offers quietly, but he shakes his head.

"You're not a child," he says, confused, then dismissive. "I wouldn't do this with a child." Whatever "this" might be, might become.

"I think Shakespeare said it best," she decides after a moment, taking his statements seriously for once, taking him seriously. "In _Romeo and Juliet_, yeah?"

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet?" he tries to quote but she giggles halfway through, kisses his mouth shut as incomprehensible amusement flows freely from her. He loves her laughter but he craves her attention and decides something must be done about this.

He shifts his hands on her, holds her close until her laughter subsides, until he instills in her a precious stillness. Resting his head against hers, he whispers to her, twists verse into a statement of his own making. "So Valiant would, were she not Valiant call'd," he murmurs, brushing her hair away from the delicate shell of her ear, twining the strands between his fingers, "retain that dear perfection which she owes Without that title. Valiant, speak thy name and for that name which is unknown to me . . ."

His hands ghost down her sides, fingertips brushing the clinging cloth of her top. She shivers beneath his light touch, leans into him with shaking breath, cradles him with her hips.

". . . Take all myself," he finishes softly, pressing a kiss to her hair.

"Yeah," she breathes shakily, lips brushing his neck as her warm breath caresses his skin, "definitely a seduction."

His lips quirk and he shifts, presses into her for her gasp more than physical satisfaction. "How am I doing?"

There are moments when the world turns without him, when all the worlds turn without him, when his feeble tugs at the strings of time give the result he strives for. There are moments that last forever in the gap of a heartsbeat, that last and last and last until he has taken his fill of them. There are moments when he stands outside of time and strains his ears for the infinite reward that is the heartsbeat of the universe.

It doesn't seem fair, when she answers him, when she gives him a fleeting glimpse into her mind, that this isn't one of those moments but only a instant as ephemeral as true instants are.

"Take me to bed," she says, hesitancy and trust twining behind her words. It's a command and a request and a plea and he knows in that instant, in that fleeting instant, that he will never be able to deny her anything.

.-.-.-.-.-.

She's in his bedroom.

She's on his bed.

Her jeans and knickers are not.

This, he thinks, is quite promising.

He shucks his frock coat, unbuttons his cuffs and his vest, all the while watching her watch him. Her top fits her snugly, has ridden up until it barely covers her navel. She rises to her knees, reaches forward to untie his cravat. _"S'like unwrapping a present_,_" _she'd said before. Her attitude towards this hasn't changed, doesn't seem to have changed.

She's never so serious as when she's undressing him, never so uniquely focused as when she's studying his clothes and body. Her touches tempt, but they're not meant to tease. It's an exploration of him, feels like one, her fingers stroking skin and fabric alike, testing the textures.

Shirtless, he unbuttons his fly for himself only for her to catch his hand. He frowns and she smiles, slinks off the bed with her palm pressed against him, fingers cupping. A noise wells desperately in his throat, attempts to take shape and ultimately fails: he still doesn't know her name.

She pulls his trousers and pants down to mid-thigh and murmurs for him to sit.

Thinking she might be picking up his speech habits, he does, expecting her to complete this task she seems so fond of.

She kneels instead.

He's fairly certain he knows what's about to happen, has gone so far as to purchase a copy of _Interspecies Sex for Dummies: With A Human_ to be sure about the general situation. He knows humans do this to each other, didn't think she'd do this to him. He's certainly not human and besides, it's an odd way of expressing affection, isn't it, licking one another's private bits and –

"Ah," he says as her mouth closes around him. "That's- That's certainly. That's."

Her tongue. Oh, her tongue. She. Her tongue. There, and. She's. Oh. Yes, that. Yes. Oh.

Chapter twenty-seven of his handy reference source – the bit about receiving oral sex – makes itself immediately useful. His hands fist in his sheets, cling to the duvet instead of pulling at her hair. He fights to keep his hips still, panics slightly as he realizes he can't move his legs, still trapped in his trousers. Her hands are already at his waist, keeping him from rocking up into her.

"You," he says. "You." Thousands of versions of that one pronoun enter his mind, attempt to flood through his mouth. One of them has to fit her, at least one, something to call her, something to call on, oh please.

Cheeks hollowing, she, oh, she's sucking on him, she's, ah. It feels like, like withdrawing, like pulling out of her except he stays inside, except it doesn't hurt. It's unnatural and bizarre and he can't imagine why it doesn't feel wrong. All that is tangible and true in this universe has shrunk somehow, condensed itself into this. He flares inside of her mouth, watches her eyes widen.

She makes a noise, a startled noise, and his cry is twice as loud. He forgets a bit of chapter twenty-seven in the end, forgets a great deal of topics he can't vaguely name. Pushing at her shoulder, half-mad from biological inability, he gasps, "I'm not going to- I can't-" He needs to be inside of her, inside more than her mouth. His body refuses to climax, forbids useless release and if instinct is to be followed here, all of instinct must be obeyed. She would wear her jaw out before he came and he's far too impatient to let her try.

With a foresight he can't believe she has, she opens her mouth wide as she releases him, not tugging at his sensitive flesh at all.

He collapses backwards, falls from seated to sprawled and tries to comprehend, tries to take his very unTime Lord-like feelings and make sense of them. Impossible. It's impossible and she's ridding him of his trousers fully, at last, finally and he's still flared and it's the strangest thing he's ever felt, being flared without being inside of someone. His hips jerk uncontrollably and he yells a strangled shout, his body demanding sensation. That bizarre panic returns and he flounders until the universe rights itself.

She mounts him, wet heat enveloping him, stretching and molding and pressing down with blazing firmness. Panic turns to ecstasy with enough speed to wind him. Penetration has never felt like this, never occurred with him in this state. It's glorious, exquisite, utterly overwhelming.

His hearts hammer against her hands, his back arching, hips rolling, grinding upwards. They're so close to the edge of the bed and if she falls off, it'll kill him, he's almost certain it would kill him now, but there's no stopping to readjust, to reclaim balance. He doesn't want balance or objectivity or reason or any of the things that separate the Time Lord from the Gallifreyan; he doesn't care at all, not now, not with her in exchange.

Her hair falls about her face, hides her features and taunts him, too far for him to touch. He holds her hips, his hands gripping out of their own volition, gripping with enough strength to bruise, enough to hurt her and that's the last thing he wants or possibly, horribly, the second-to-last thing he wants, because in reality, the last thing he wants is to let her go.

One hand leaves his chest, leaves him cold and blazing, and she touches herself. He recalls chapter three, recalls basic biology and fingers her clitoris, keeps at it until her back arches and she shudders around him, primed and ready for his release. He gives it to her, cries out wordlessly as she shouts his name.

After, still on top of him, still around him, she kisses his face, brushes her lips across his cheeks, his eyelids, his brow. Her sweat-dampened top clings to her more than ever, rubs against his chest. He breathes slowly, feels almost tired enough to sleep.

"Valiant," he breathes. "From _valliant _of a slightly different spelling, meaning brave. That from _valoir_, which is 'be worthy' or, originally, 'be strong.' That from _valere_," he concludes. "Meaning . . ."

"Yeah?" she asks softly, brushing his hair back from his face.

Unknowingly, he nuzzles into her hand. "'Be strong'," he says. "'Be able.' 'Be well.' 'Have worth.' 'Have-'"

She shifts on top of him, both sighing as he slips out of her, both now conditioned for the withdrawing.

"'Have power,'" he concludes, opening his eyes to watch hers.

"Over you?" she asks, the smallest frown of confusion crossing her face.

He reaches up, brushes her hair out of her face, the sweat-soaked strands sticking to her skin. "Yes," he says, comforted, reassured once more that this isn't some needlessly complicated trap. "You are." He's referring to her position, obviously, nothing more.

She rolls her eyes at his deliberate obtuseness, stills as his hands tug lightly at the hem of her top. The fabric stretches in his hand, explaining how it fits her so well. The fabric is also slightly itchy against his chest and he feels it might interfere with the approaching cuddle.

Placing her hands over his, she looks at him in seriousness, an expression rare enough from her to make him take immediate notice. "I want to show you something. Something I got on Anlosia."

He thinks of lights and of being on fire, thinks of unexpected rescue. "Was this before or after we met there?"

"After," she replies. "Definitely after."

"Are you going to give me dirty thoughts again?" he inquires, not fully understanding where this is going. It scares him a little, how he can't ever fully understand her.

"And something else to think about, yeah," she agrees. She draws her top off, drops it onto the duvet next to them.

He raises his hand, touches the mark on her shoulder. Her head tilts to the side, bares her neck to him. "I," he says and stops.

"You," she replies and nods, reaching behind her back to unhook her bra.

There's too much wonder in his mind to allow room for proper appreciation. She doesn't take offense, simply rolls off of him to press against his side, properly naked.

For the sake of scientific reasoning – or so he'll claim – he lowers his mouth to her unmarred shoulder, bites and sucks and nips and leaves his mark with her clutching at his back. The end product is not the exact mirror image of its partner, not arranged exactly symmetrically – but it's not like he was trying for that. It is, however, very close. Though he's not an expert in reading this sort of thing, it does seem to be a match, once differing angle is taken into consideration.

"How?" he asks her.

"Told you," she says simply. "Non-linear love story."

"I took the slow path," he realizes, numb with amazement. "I never take the slow path."

"You do for me," her shining eyes tell him and he quakes at the sensation of belonging to someone so much smaller and so much larger than himself.

Unaware of this, she shrugs and says with her mouth, "Guess you do sometimes."

There's so much to ask her, only one question she might answer. "When will I see you again?"

She cups his cheek and kisses him with a sadness he believes comes from parting ways. "When you need me," she answers.

He holds her tight against him, too much night left for her to leave just yet. "Tomorrow, then?" he asks, forcing himself to be playful simply to see her smile.

There's no smile, only a shake of her golden head. "Tomorrow," she says, "for me."

.-.-.-.-.-.

The following day, the Cloister Bell rings.

Every Cloister Bell rings.

.-.-.-.-.-.

The Time Lords are going to war.


	3. Chapter 3

III.

He sits on the hilltop, sits with carved stone beneath his hands. What is within him is nothing the ions of the Eye of Orion can take away, can alter for the better. He sits here on this deteriorating wall nonetheless, breathes himself into stillness and waits. His mind is old enough, experienced enough; he has come to conclusions and found an unshakable belief. He knows himself, can anticipate his own actions.

Light footsteps touch his ears, the sound of trainers on crumbling ruins behind him, and he is proven correct.

He doesn't turn, doesn't look, barely breathes until she places her hand atop his. She stands behind him, reaches for him as naturally as she ever has.

"You knew," he says.

"Yes," she admits.

He bows his head, lowers his gaze to his lap and fails to pull his hand out from under hers. He thinks to, but is unable to muster the will. Once there was rage. Once there was fury. Now, there's merely exhaustion, merely the atrophy that claims all. Now there's this moment, this horrific lasting moment where there's grit in the lines of his palm and her heat burning into the back of his hand.

"You never said," he accuses.

"I couldn't."

"I know."

The atmosphere of the planet bombards his senses, confusing him as to why he decided this would be the place. Positive ions cannot improve his mood, only irritate him in their pestering of his senses. It might be the ruins that drew him here today. No, it is. The destruction, he thinks, and the return of life afterwards. It's a slow return, as these things go.

She steps closer, plants her hands on the wall and lifts herself up to sit facing the way she came. They sit side-by-side, gazing in opposite directions. It all feels so horrendously symbolic.

"I have to go kill everyone soon," he says, as if informing her of a previous engagement. Which, he supposes, he is.

"And save everyone else," she adds, stressing this thin hope.

That's not what it feels like. That's very likely what won't happen.

He shakes his head, thinking for the first time that "child" suits her just as well as "valiant" does. They still don't look at each other. "I got the news today. Romana's been over the plan with me for quite some time now, but the news . . . I got that today."

She tightens her hand around his, dares to.

He dares to let her.

"Susan . . . My Susan . . ." He swallows, closes his eyes shut as tightly as he can. "My granddaughter is dead. Not dead, nonexistent. The world she settled on, the man she loved, the child she adopted . . . It never was. She- She never was. The moment I left her there, she was gone."

"I'm so sorry," she breathes.

He's never tasted anything so bitter as his own laugh.

"I'm relieved," he tells her, lets her snatch her hand back in an expression of whatever human emotion he's sent her into. "My granddaughter is dead because I left her with the man she loved and I'm relieved. _Relieved_." A sound escapes him, follows that word. It's half a laugh, half a sob. "I wouldn't have been able to go ahead with this if- Not Susan. And now I can. Romana, Drax, Leela . . . Leela's children. Them, yes," he says aloud for the first time, breaks because it's not the lie he needs it to sound like, because it's the worst truth there could possibly be. "But not my Susan."

Her arms close around him despite the awkward angle, hugging him from the side with her cheek pressed to his shoulder. It's not what he expected, not entirely what he wants, but with her, that never does seem to matter, does it?

"Why does it have to be you?" she asks him, asks the universe at large. "My Doctor."

It should burn, that she can claim him when he cannot so much as hold onto her. It should and it doesn't and he's too far gone to wonder about it, only to take notice of it. "My TARDIS," he corrects, turning her words into his own, changing his to change hers, to perhaps make both less true.

"What about your TARDIS?" she asks, still holding onto him. He frees the arm trapped between them to put it around her. It must be a balancing act for a human, sitting like this on a wall.

"Well," he says, explaining it to her as much to himself, "she's old. She's very old. She wasn't always mine, you see. Those two details are what make her important. TT40's went out of use centuries ago, all of them except for mine. Everyone traded them in for a better model." He can still taste his laugh, the bitterness now textured with his words.

"But TARDISes are alive," she protests, distraught because she cares.

"They are," he agrees, "but Time Lords aren't supposed to be sentimental, my dear." His arm around her tightens. "There's a lot of things we aren't supposed to be."

She takes that in, thinks about it. Shaking her head against his shoulder, she returns to her line of inquiry. "Why's it got to be your TARDIS, then? Just because she's old and used?"

The term sets his teeth on edge and yet she doesn't seem to understand why. "Her age makes her stable for what needs to be done. More stable than any other TARDIS, at least. She's the oldest left running." He grimaces with memory. "They were always pushing, always so irritated that I wouldn't exchange her for a TT280 or some rubbish like that. We'd be little better than Cybermen, if we all had that mentality," he scoffs. "'Upgrade. It must be upgraded.'" He shakes his head, adds softly: "Idiocy."

"Why's it got to be you who pilots her?"

Her words reach him, strike him through layers of numbing despair. "It won't be anyone else!" he shouts and he can't remember the last time he yelled.

She flinches, looks at him with wide eyes as he twists to look at her directly. It's impossible, utterly impossible, and yet it's true: she doesn't understand.

"She's my TARDIS," he states, glaring at the horizon instead of her, voice too loud even in his own ears. "Letting another use her this way would be like . . ." He can't think of anything so vile.

He looks into her eyes and suddenly he can.

"It would be like allowing a stranger to make love to you," he says, touches her face. "No, worse than that."

She covers his hand with hers, bites her lip as he struggles to say the words in his mind.

"It would be like telling a stranger to violate you," he tells her. "And feeling . . . _relieved_ afterwards." The word is spat into the air, his eyes lowered from hers as he says it.

"I . . . I didn't know," she manages after a moment.

"I didn't -" He pauses, nods to himself. "I _won't_. I won't tell you this, will I?"

She shakes her head and his hand slips into her hair.

He fears the man he will soon become, the man who will find this woman where he cannot. His wait has been a long one, feels as if it has been, and he knows now that it was for this, all for this. This moment, when the worlds turn without him, must turn without him.

"There's a practical reason as well," he adds softly, gentles his voice for her. "The official reason Romana's announced."

She looks at him, lets him know she's willing to listen. He sees no recognition in her eyes, sees only the interest of the devoted. This woman has no idea who Romana is.

Was.

"Her second bonding with me is what will protect me," he explains. "It places me in a state of temporal grace beyond the norm. I'm tied to her enough to be in tune with her song, but not so tightly bound as to put me in blast zone with her, shall we say. Call it a buffer of time, or a shield." More or less, he mentally adds. Remembers his first night with her, speaking of more and less.

It's the less, he concludes. That's what they've ended up with.

"And that's why it has to be you," she says.

"Yes," he answers and realizes that he's convinced himself.

They sit hip-to-hip now, legs dangling off different sides of the same stone wall. They've twisted at the waist, turned enough to enfold the other in their arms and tell themselves that they won't ever let go.

"Who are you?" he asks her for the last time. It's a soft question, repeated solely because he's who he is and so must always have something to say.

"Just someone who loves you," she tells him, speaks into his shoulder.

He pulls back gently to cup her face in his hands, the awkward angle not about to stop him. "That can hardly be your most defining characteristic."

"Feels like it is," she confesses and he brushes her tears away with the pads of his thumbs.

"I knew you'd come," he tells her, unable to properly reply. "When I needed you, you said. And I . . . I knew I would bring you to me, here." He presses his lips to her brow and her arms wrap around him tight.

There's something wrong with his respiratory bypass.

And his eyes.

She doesn't seem to mind.

He shifts when she lets him, swings himself around to face the same direction as her. He looks down, wipes his face with his sleeve, rubs the velvet the wrong way with his cheek. There's so much. There's always so much and there's always been so much and if this doesn't work, there will never be anything else ever again.

"It should work," he says. "In theory, it works." He brushes her hair behind her ear, watches her face and feels it. "It's about being entwined. Timelines tangle sometimes, become inseparable. If you're very, very lucky," he tells her in a murmur, "you get something like this. A non-linear love story, if you will."

"I will," she answers and he kisses her, as softly as she replied. There's that cheek, that indomitable spirit. It's been battered but not bruised, not yet.

"Yes," he says, "you will. And I'm scared." Susan was entwined with the version of Earth he left her on. Once that version vanished, so did she. And now this woman, precious in another way, now she entwines with him.

"I know," she says and he's glad she does. "I know the risks."

"You're mad to take them," he tells her, knowing that he'll have to do the same.

"Yes," she replies and there's no arguing with her when she agrees so readily. "Tell me what happens if you aren't lucky."

"If you aren't lucky," he says, picking up his earlier thread, "you find yourself with a mutual self-destruct option. The Daleks would never think of it that way. No imagination, no consideration for the rest of the universe, barely any concept of time – the technology was stolen, but not the knowledge." His shoulders shake from what might be silent laughter. He can pretend it is. Better than the truth. So much is better than the truth. "They'll never see it coming."

"But don't they realize that destroying the Time Lords would mean destroying themselves?" she asks, confused and striving to understand everything in the way only a human can.

"If they used a temporally based weapon to do so, it would," he replies, the shaking most definitely not from silent laughter.

She holds him once more, holds him until it stops. Until the shaking stops, at least.

"But they don't need that," he continues when he can. "Superior numbers and their old extermination tactics; they require nothing else. Our last line of defense, Arcadia . . ."

Don't think of Ace don't think of Ace don't think of her don't think Dorothy McShane oh Ace don't think never think again his poor girl-

There's a sensation of movement, of being gently pulled down from his stone seat into arms warm and waiting. There's something strange in his chest, something that wails and cries and pricks him behind the eyes until he's sobbing and weak because there are things in this existence which are infinitely larger than he is and far more terrible than even that.

There are fingers in his hair and a soothing voice at his ear and she can't be, she couldn't possibly be so resilient as to support him so effortlessly. From _valoir_, he thinks. Meaning to be strong.

Time slips away from him, falls from his fumbling fingertips and numb hands. When it returns to him, they're seated at the base of the wall, or she is. He's on his side, exhausted, his head in her lap, her hand stroking his hair.

"Shhh . . ." she tells him when he tries to speak, to ineffectually explain or awkwardly apologize. "I've got you."

He shifts, turns onto his back and looks up into her eyes. "Do you do this often?" he asks. She must, he thinks. There's no other way she could handle it so well.

She shakes her head, drying his face with the soft cotton of her sleeve. "This is the first time."

"Ah," he says, most certainly not leaning into her touch. "Now I definitely feel embarrassed."

"I love you," she explains simply.

"You must be absolutely mad," he decides.

She shrugs lightly, the rise and fall of her shoulders a reassuring movement. All of her motions are. "You love me anyway." He's missed her audacity, her wild and completely correct assumptions.

"Clearly," he says, "I must be mad as well."

She smiles weakly. "Pretty much, yeah."

"Ah," he replies, nearly returning the expression. "That explains a lot." He closes his eyes to the feel of her hand in his hair, her gentle ministrations. For the first time in far too long, he breathes. There's nothing wrong with his respiratory bypass any longer. Besides some itching, his eyes are fine as well.

Fingertips trace the lines of his face, the pad of her index finger lightly brushing his skin, ghosting over his cheekbones and straying to his lips. He kisses the digit out of forming habit more than anything else and when he opens his eyes, she's studying him so intently, memorizing him so desperately that there can be only one reason for it.

He doesn't comment, simply sits up and falls back on his ever-trusty conversation starter. "Jelly baby?"

The light in her eyes changes to something brighter and an involuntary giggle escapes her. "Yeah," she says, taking one, "you're definitely mad."

"This is my last bag," he tells her, setting the white paper bag down between them. "We should finish it before I go."

"Okay," she says, accepting this as naturally as she accepts the rest of him. And then she asks, "What d'you mean, your last bag? You make it sound like it's the last one ever."

He exhales heavily, wonders how to put this. "Do you know the history of these?" he asks.

"Jelly babies have a history?" she asks. "Right, sorry, 'course. Everything has a history."

He nods. "And jelly babies are no exception." He shifts against the stone wall, presses his back against the grime and moss of centuries. "In 1919 of the Gregorian calendar," he tells her, "they were first made. In Sheffield, I think. They were to mark the end of the first human World War. They were called Peace Babies until your Second World War. After that, the name was changed. Far too ironic, otherwise."

She's clever enough to make the leap: "They stopped making them during the war, didn't they."

"War is not a time for sweets, my dear. After, maybe . . . . No. There's no 'after' for a Time War." He shakes his head as he chews. "Humans," he says, speaking the word with affection. "You take such a perfect and impossible concept and what do you do? You cover it with sugar and starch and snack on it." He smiles at the thought.

She watches him until he looks back at her, until he sees the awe in her eyes. "You run around through time and space," she says, "saving people and planets and giving them peace as a sweet."

"I used to," he agrees.

She looks as if she's about to protest, about to make some remark about him being able to do it again. Thankfully, she doesn't. She asks him something instead.

"What else did you use to do?" She asks him this in the same way he asks for her name, asks without hope of an answer.

He's already cried before her, wept like the child he's never been.

After that, mere speech comes easily to him.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He tells her everything.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Almost.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He thinks of things he hasn't thought of in years, speaks of people whose names any other Time Lord would have forgotten by now. He speaks of the Time Lords he knows he will never mention to her again, recalls the Master and all his betrayals, details his grievances against Romana and his immense pride in her. He tells her about how someone was always taking the dog when they left, about how he got used to not having a robot pet. He tells her more important things, all mixed up with matters frivolous and inane.

He complains because she seems to want him to, because she's interested in what annoys him and silently takes his side no matter what he says, no matter if he says he deserved what he got. He doesn't say this about the trials his fellow Time Lords have inflicted upon him, doesn't say this about his exile or his times with himself in the Death Zone.

He explains how it's all his fault, how he failed when he was younger and naïve and so thoughtless as to believe it would all still work out for the best. He teaches her the history of the Daleks and details his involvement, his failures. He tells her all of it, except for the parts he doesn't.

He doesn't speak of Arcadia or tell of what happened to Ace.

He doesn't make further mention of Susan, some pains too deep to share.

He doesn't tell her that he wants to die, truly and permanently die, for what he will do.

All the while, she nods and listens and lets him say or not say what he will, as he will. She takes his hand, holds it like she doesn't know how to let go. She doesn't comment, doesn't prompt, simply takes in every word he imparts to her.

He talks until the sweets are gone and she eats them very slowly.

In the end, he clears his throat, feeling a strain he tells himself is only physical. "And that's it, really." Standing up, he winces at the simple movement. Still for so long, his body doesn't quite know how to cope. He pulls her up by the hand. Touches her shoulder. Cups her face in his hands.

This moment, this image, this final glimpse of these hands touching her: this, he imprints upon his memory. Her eyes drink him in and she bites her lip as she realizes what she's given away. He shakes his head, silently tells her that regeneration is almost the expected result for a task such as his.

He looks at her, thinks of all he has yet to do and still he feels it, feels it simply from the sight of her, from holding her in his arms. Hope. Hope that there will be more than this, hope that something survives. Hope that someday, long after this is done and his people are dust, he could once again be a man worthy of love.

She presses one last kiss to his lips. "Go save the universe," she tells him.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He does.


	4. Chapter 4

IV.

There is sight and sound and none of it has any meaning.

It's silent in his head, the silence of the dead and he thinks that might be where he is, with the dead.

.-.-.-.-.-.

His hand opens. His hand closes.

There's nothing to touch.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Shapes move and lights change and the world cycles past. Sounds and noises form words he cares nothing about. Intensive care. Primary respiratory system failure. Extreme dehydration. Secondary respiratory system failure. Emergency situation.

Cellular rejuvenation.

Condition: Stable, unresponsive.

Life forms all about him, life in forms endlessly repeating his name without directing it at him. It's madness. It's eternity.

It's exactly what he deserves.

.-.-.-.-.-.

His hand opens. His hand closes.

Simple repetition causes simple pain.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He has no concept of time, as he has no concept of space. All he knows is nothing, all he responds to is nothing.

That's not true, only what the words say, what the words believe.

Something buzzes against his face and the words talk of cleaning, of shaving, of making him presentable.

There's no point to it. He doesn't respond beyond a slow blink.

.-.-.-.-.-.

His hand opens. His hand closes.

There's something warm.

.-.-.-.-.-.

"Oh my god," she says. "Oh my god," she says again.

He doesn't know what's going on, could easily discover it if he cared. There's heat and movement and contact and pressure and air. There's motion and colour and shape.

"You're going to be okay, I'm here now. Oh my god."

There's a great deal of sound, a racket. There are other words, words he likes much less and this is what convinces him that he cares. He cares about the first words, the sound behind them. Almost, he reaches for the meaning behind them as well.

"No! You can't make me leave 'im! 'M not goin' anywhere, 'm not hurtin' 'im and you can't say that 'm not helpin' 'im! Please, you have to let me try!"

The answering noise is pointless, speaks of pointless things.

"Wha- yeah, can't you read? I'm family. Lookit this, says right here. 'M family and 'm not goin' anywhere."

The racket fades, drifts away and frustration fills the air from afar. Something touches his face, touches a face that doesn't feel like his. Something white and flat is waved in front of his eyes, but he's not in the mood for sweets.

"Slightly-psychic paper. One of your better ideas, yeah? Yeah? 'Cause you're so impressive."

There's pressure in his hand, resistance when his fingers squeeze. It's soft and has only so much give.

"Yeah! Yeah, that's right, I can admit it. You are impressive, an' . . . Can't you look at me?"

He sees pink and yellow.

.-.-.-.-.-.

His hand opens. His hand closes.

She's still here.

.-.-.-.-.-.

"Doctor, please," she says. "Come back."

Noise comes and goes, joins and leaves. The voice that speaks for him shares words, shares moods. Anger, possessiveness, worry. Something softer, something hard.

"I need to use the loo, but I'll only be a mo'. And I expect you to say somethin' when I get back, yeah?"

Warmth leaves and a cacophony erupts. Noise and life and wonder. Time passing.

"What, what is it?"

Noise and life and wonder. Confusion.

"That's a good sign, yeah? Can't be random, his vitals doing all that stuff when I left. Look, watch this."

Warmth returns, holds tight. The cacophony erupts once more, sounds electric and organic alike. Noise and life and wonder.

"I told you! I told you! He's knows I'm here!"

.-.-.-.-.-.

His hand stays shut.

She doesn't pull away again.

.-.-.-.-.-.

"It's complicated."

Soft sounds urge, question.

"In a department store basement on Earth, or at a power generator on Anlosia."

Soft sounds exclaim.

"Yeah, I know, sounds crazy. S'where we met, though. Guess I should say 'when,' but that's kinda hard to explain."

Soft sounds fade into silence, hover in the background. A hand touches his face, lips press against his brow.

"Call it a non-linear love story."

.-.-.-.-.-.

His hand squeezes.

Hers has gone limp.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Weight and golden colour and warmth and breath, all pressing down on his chest amid the dark. Breath and sound that aren't his, better known than his.

". . . .Mm."

He breathes in deeply, smells bitter exhaustion. Golden colour rises, weight readjusts.

" . . . hm . . . ?"

Weight lifts, warmth fades and the artificial cacophony returns from medical machinery.

". . . Are you really having a panic attack because I stopped using you as a pillow?"

"Yes."

.-.-.-.-.-.

His hand holds to hers.

She holds him just as tightly.

.-.-.-.-.-

They're going to walk the hospital grounds, she tells the nurses in the morning.

Untested legs refuse to move at first, refuse to support this long-limbed, solid body. She supports him instead, quietly slipping his dignity into her pocket along with his hearts.

"Nice jimjams," she says to him, helping to prop him up.

"Oi!" he protests easily, the syllable coming readily to these lips. For a minute, for this, for her, he forgets what he cannot bear to remember. It will return to him all too soon, he knows, but now there's a task ahead, a goal in sight.

Moment to moment, he has to live now. No looking back. No stopping to think. Not just yet. Maybe not ever, but of course, he's not thinking about that. He has enough to think about already.

She fits strangely under his arm, is the perfect height for him to lean on now, no longer the perfect height to kiss. The ground is far away and every step fools him into thinking he's about to fall. Shoes have been procured from somewhere, hard boots instead of a gentleman's footwear. They fit his feet and he lets her tie the laces. He'd do it himself, but she seems to think he'd fall on his face.

She's probably right, but he's not about to tell her that.

They maneuver through the halls and everyone seems to know her. Nurses beam at them, come up to them to praise his precious girl, to tell him how his little missus has lived at his bedside since the moment she had arrived.

"Mrs. Smith?" he tries to murmur into her ear but it comes out in a louder Northern burr.

She blushes and kisses these lips that he can't quite seem to get used to. It requires some awkward bending of the neck on his part. "They would only let family in and we're not exactly the same species," she explains.

"That all?" he asks, eyebrows raised, words feeling thick in his mouth.

Her blush deepens, yet she refuses to drop her gaze. "Are you implying something, Mr. Smith?"

"That you're mine," he says and blinks. It's not untrue, simply blunter than he used to be. He's not sure what will come out of his mouth next.

She shrugs, the rise and fall of her shoulders distinct beneath his arm. "That's a given," she replies, says it so simply that he assumes it must be true.

An unfamiliar pull of muscle occurs and he smiles with this face for the first time.

"Fantastic," he breathes, pressing a kiss to her hair.

.-.-.-.-.-.

She swings their hands between them.

He knows he still loves her.

.-.-.-.-.-.

"I need clothes," he's forced to admit the third time they try to walk past the hospital exit discreetly.

"I still like you naked," she replies, only a weak tease behind the words. "You could always try that."

He rolls his eyes, catalogues the new expression for further study. He continues as if he hasn't heard her. "Can't sneak out of a hospital dressed in a hospital gown." It's good for sneaking around inside of one, but he's long had his fill of that. That's the second time running he's regenerated in a hospital, thinks it is. He doesn't like it, needs out.

She starts to ask him again, "Are you sure-"

"Get me back to the TARDIS," he interrupts. "Get me back and I'll be fine."

She looks up at him, looks further up at him than she's ever done before – from his view of things, at least. She looks at him and he realizes he doesn't know what he looks like. He doesn't know the eyes she's looking into, doesn't entirely know the man he is now.

She seems to.

"Okay," she says, nodding, trusting him as naturally as ever.

Memories assail him as they walk, pummel at his defenses as he fights to ignore them. Increasingly, he has to stop, has to halt to breathe in a way he hasn't needed since his first incarnation.

He feels so old and she looks so alive.

He focuses on her instead of himself, has the feeling that he'll do this often in times to come. She looks at him with concern and he shakes his head, lies to her until he thinks she might believe him.

Eventually, he finds an outfit the same way he did last time, raids a locker after some young physician changes into his scrubs. He doesn't recognize the man as matching his new build, only decides upon the victim of his theft when his companion's eyes widen, when she stares at the black jeans and maroon jumper as if she knows them personally.

The clothes fit, yet he still feels disquietingly uncovered.

She seems to realize this, keeps her words soft and her helping arm steady as they make their way to the exit for the final time.

Somebody shouts, raising a clamor about their missing belt.

"Run!" she yells and they stumble their way to freedom.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He holds her with one hand.

He touches a broken police box with the other.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He loses himself for a time, throws his mind against that of his timeship and wails a telepathic cry for the sake of hearing something, anything.

She can't hear him, doesn't even know what he's doing.

Bent over the remains of the TARDIS console with no tears left to spend, he doesn't know either. He doesn't know, simply acts.

He shouts and he rages and he remembers, he _remembers_, damn it all, damn all of existence, he remembers what he has done. He curses Romana, heaps blame on the mastermind, on the last President of Gallifrey, on his _friend_. He heaps the blame and he tears it down again, claiming it for himself, taking these last shreds of his former life and attempting to define the man he's become by them.

For a time, he goes mad.

She lets him.

When he comes back to her, exhaustion has numbed rage, blunted grief and waylaid self-directed fury. He tries to sit down and falls instead, the distance down so much larger than it once was.

She's at his side before he can cry out, her arms around him before he can push her away. She tries to cradle him against her, tries to help him weep. He resists, pulls back.

"Everyone I loved," he tells her. "Everyone but you."

"I know," she says. "But maybe-"

"No."

She flinches without pulling away, takes the rebuke and moves closer.

It hurts because she's only going to leave again.

They sit together amid rubble where they once danced. He waits, can only wait for her next act of abandonment. When she moves, when she starts to move, before she starts to move, he stops her, rises over her.

Wide eyes gaze up at him from the floor and he smells something else behind the fear, sees her cheeks flush as her lips part.

As consent goes, it's dubious at best, but he takes it all the same. It's permission enough for him to drive his knee between her legs, force her thighs apart and grind into her. He runs on instinct, mind pleading for escape. This is basic and simple and there is no thought here.

She doesn't resist him, doesn't freeze from fear or reject him, doesn't push him away with the revulsion he deserves. It would barely have mattered if she had; his grip on her is enough to stop any escape, enough to terrify him. He's not going to let go, he _can't_, not now, not her.

Her tongue forces its way into his mouth, tastes differently than it once did. New taste buds. New ears, too, ears she pulls his head down by.

Consensual, he determines, and tugs her jeans and knickers halfway down her thighs. Her fingernails scrape his back through the stolen jumper, mark new flesh and drive him to look, drive him to see. He rears up, rids her of her top and, remembering the man he used to be, he bunches it up to tuck it behind her head.

He knows the marks on her shoulders, knows them with a raging possessiveness he fears will define him. Four to twelve days for a mark like that to fade, depending on the human skin. Four to twelve days, for her. They could have made love for the first time three days ago for all he knows. And it's been _years_ since he touched her last.

She tugs at the jumper and he complies hastily to take it off, his movements quick to shorten the time he has to release her for the task. He shoves at her jeans with his legs, hears two thumps and realizes she's kicked her trainers off. His newly uncoordinated movements buy her time to remove her bra as he fumbles with his own fly, cursing the belt. She bends beneath him, straining, pushes his jeans down with her sock-clad feet.

He takes his rage and his loneliness and buries it between her thighs.

Pained, she yells, but he can't pull out, can't withdraw. Instinct forbids it; biology punishes it. He's already begun to flare and fresh flesh is even more sensitive than the norm. Her face contorts and he tries to withdraw anyway.

Her legs wrap around him, his precious girl clinging against his body as he rises up, attempts to rise and retreat. "No," she gasps out as his arms shake from the effort of holding himself up, of pulling away from her. "No, you, stay."

He half-collapses on top of her, pants as she shivers beneath him. This is instinct, this is what Time Lords ignore. What they used to ignore. It's instinct to cling, to hold, to entwine and resist parting. Needing to keep her with him, he flares, realizes that she knows or has at least been told of the pain of premature withdrawal.

After doing so much to protect him, she's not going to physically harm him, not about to pull away. And so he fights release, struggles against the inevitable outcome of being enveloped by her. If he finds release, he releases her. So he won't. He's a madman to think it, a madman to attempt it, but he's always been crazy.

"Okay," she breathes. "I'm ready now, it's alright." Her hands stroke his back, an exploratory touch. It's her first time all over again. "God, you got bigger."

He inhales her scent and fights against the need to move. It's not a need he's ever won out against, but for her, he's willing to try.

She rocks her hips against his and in the gap of a heartsbeat, he's already lost.

If he can't keep her with him, he'll have to claim her instead. He does, grinding into her, biting, sucking, touching her in ways these hands should be clumsy with and yet aren't. There's nothing gentle in him now, nothing so soft or tender as a naïve, romantic fool.

She holds to him, legs squeezing, inner walls clenching and just like that, he's gone.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He lets go of her hand.

She stays where she is.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Post-coital repair work is not the staple of a normal relationship, he's almost certain. It's a small and tiny fact, utterly insignificant, yet it vaguely reassures him. Not domestic, this.

He doesn't know why it's so important to him yet, simply knows that domestic is to be avoided at all costs.

Mrs. Smith, he thinks, watching her add to the pile of scrap metal and ruined gadgetry. He rolls his eyes at the thought, rolls his eyes instead of shuddering. It's not what he wants and more than that, it doesn't suit her at all.

She's wincing as she moves, trying not to let him see. He knows because he's not stupid and because he has eyes. It's equally obvious that she doesn't want to discuss it, isn't going to rebuke him for his act of savagery. Another obvious detail that has him thinking is the blatant newness of his body, her reactions to it.

He wonders.

Thoughts of her are welcome distractions, as unsettling as they might be. There are things he doesn't ask her, doesn't press her for. He doesn't want to know how long he was catatonic, has a vague idea from the condition of his TARDIS, his abused third heart. He nearly asks why she took so long to come for him, only to realize he never learned the name of that hospital, didn't pay attention to his surroundings as he left. It's his own fault; he can't say it's much of a surprise.

The repair work goes slowly, slowly by his standards. He improvises and wracks his mind and cannibalizes parts from pieces of machinery he'd forgotten he'd had. They rebuild the main structure, sweep and lift and clear away the once-beautiful remains of the console room.

Together, they haul in grating from the storage rooms below to set over the holes in the floor. He likes it, he decides. He tells her what he plans to do with his TARDIS, how he plans to fix his timeship; at no point does she look surprised with what he proposes.

When his unused hands begin to protest, he tells her to take a break, tells her because he knows she won't. Taking what an idiot would call a leap of faith – it's not a leap, only a walk, and he hasn't got a shred of faith for even a step – he heads deeper into his ship, inspects damage and wanders.

He finds it in the Wardrobe, nearly trips on it with his too-long legs. It's black and solid and when he throws it around his shoulders, the weight presses at him. It's perfect and hard and for the first time in this body, he starts to feel less vulnerable.

Or so he'll claim.

When he returns to the console room, he finds her attempting to untangle a Gordian knot of wiring from the pile of broken parts. She startles when she sees him, does something to the mess of components that sends it into a sparking fit.

"You stupid ape," he remarks without meaning to, bluntness spilling out and leaving him with no sense of embarrassment at all. He wouldn't have called her that, before.

She bites her lip but he sees her smile anyway.

He rolls his eyes.

Smile fading, she seems to understand, sets her task down. She takes a step towards him, takes another, takes another until she's run into the waiting circle of his arms. She breathes him in, presses her cheek against the leather and sighs, murmuring his name.

This is who he has to be, he understands now. He's the man who started her cycle, who reached into her timeline to entwine it with his. He can find her now, start for her what he's already lived through. He's waited so long, decides to wait longer, a little while longer. He needs to know who he is first, needs to find himself before he can find her. And he's frightened.

"I don't want to hurt you," he tells her hair.

"I love you, too," she tells his jacket unabashedly, her arms around his neck. "So much. Let me do that."

He doesn't think he could stop her. "Your wish is my command. Just be careful what you wish for."

"You," she says without hesitation. She touches his face, fingertips tracing cheek and nose and ears.

Her parting kiss is half-farewell, half-lament.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He takes her hand.

"Run!"


	5. Chapter 5

V.

Rose Tyler.

Shop girl of the Powell Estate.

Rolling his eyes at himself, he hooks up the plastic arm to the TARDIS's tracking cortex. It's not a bad name, it's not a bad position; it's mucking with his mind, that's all. He's been a questing Don Quixote for so long that his Dulcinea would have to be an Aldonza as well, would have to be someone with true grit behind the fantasy he's forged around her.

Just as well. He'd pick a peasant over a princess any day. Far more practical, far less whining.

"I couldn't even look at her," he explains to the TARDIS as she hums at him questioningly, his ship sensing some odd thoughts about a department store elevator. "Kept glancing away like an idiot." Him, the destroyer of planets and his own kind, unable to watch the play of thoughts behind a human girl's eyes. She'd been quick and clever and had followed his lead instantly, all without a single flicker of recognition. Rounder in face and body, her hair far longer, but still her. Still her, but not yet.

His third heart tries ineffectually to calm his first two. He gives the console an appreciative pat. "Don't tell me _you're_ worried," he scoffs. "No need for that." He knows human minds well enough, knows the basics. Knows that danger catches the human eye, knows that cliché lines about getting people killed will be thought about longer than a minute. Certainly knows that when you track one back to her home, you should immediately claim to have been doing something else.

He's not a bad liar, in this incarnation.

"Give the man a medal," he mutters to himself, making a few final adjustments. This is going well, could be. He runs away and she chases after; he tells her of matters she couldn't possibly comprehend yet and she listens; he walks with her, speaks with her, and she falls in step with him. The same bewildering effect she had on him, he seems to be having with her.

She keeps asking who he is.

He's told her to forget him and so ensured that she never will.

Ah, finished with the feed-loop. Now there's a job to do. He'll see if he can get this thing of plastic to lead him to the equally plastic source, see if he could manage to just happen to save the day in front of her.

"Rose Tyler," he says, simply because he can.

No wonder she'd laughed at the Shakespeare.

.-.-.-.-.-.

She has a boyfriend.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Mickey Smith. What sort of a name is "Mickey Smith" anyway?

He thinks of the hospital, thinks of the nurses calling her "Mrs. Smith" and smiling while they did.

He shudders.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He has the strong feeling that he's going to do something very petty involving that boy.

Or a plastic replica of him. Champagne isn't exactly his weapon of choice, but it's still very therapeutic.

.-.-.-.-.-.

She doesn't know his TARDIS.

She's always known his TARDIS.

She even says it, even questions the size and he feels betrayed somehow, even if his timeship doesn't. He tells her he's alien, tells her for his second time and her first.

And then she cries over her bloody _boyfriend_.

He's irritable and annoyed and then she starts thinking. She starts thinking and talking and pushing back at him and it's not exactly audacity, only close to it.

They run and she takes his hand.

.-.-.-.-.-.

She takes his hand, saves his life and destroys his hearts, a pathetic example of the human race clinging to her side.

Entwinement pulls at him as he leaves, tugs at his mind and shakes the parts of him which will forever be beyond her comprehension. He feels his mind tearing, feels his past attempting to splinter apart without her future in it. This isn't something he can do, isn't something he can find a way around. There's no temporal sidestep.

It's a loop he can't risk breaking, he tells himself. That's why he's so desperate.

Must be why he forgot to mention a certain little detail.

He goes back to her, gives her eight words. He can't do what she once did to him, can't perform miracles and grant revelations with just six the way she'll be able to. It's something to work on, he decides.

Something to do with her at his side.

At his side to stay.

.-.-.-.-.-.

It's never so simple as that.

.-.-.-.-.-.

She demands to know who he is, her unshakable trust in him not yet formed. He's already told her everything, told her every last thing about him – almost – but that's still yet to come.

The contrast is driving him up the wall, making him snappish, making him yell and shout and lash out at her. She shoves back at him just as hard, wounds him deeper than she knows.

But it's so easy to forgive her, to laugh with her when she reaches out to him, even if she never does say she's sorry.

.-.-.-.-.-.

"Not your wife," the tree of Cheem repeats, making conversation in a way he'd rather she not. "Not your mistress or concubine, not anything of the sort, you said."

"Did say something like that, yeah," he agrees hastily, working at the hatch to the maintenance duct with his sonic screwdriver.

"It's strange," she says and both his hearts beat at once.

"Strange how?" he asks as if it's not important. It's not, whatever it is.

"You're clearly her lover," she informs him. "And yet she doesn't seem to be yours."

He doesn't reply, not right away.

". . . I'm sorry," she apologizes, "it's none of my business."

"It's a non-linear love story," he tells her without knowing why.

The tree frowns, the bark of her cheeks tightening. "What does that mean?"

"Wish I knew," he says and the hatch to the maintenance duct finally opens.

.-.-.-.-.-.

"You're the weirdest date there's ever been," his precious girl decides, popping chips into her mouth. She chews in the way that people trying to impress don't.

He quirks his lips, eats her food. "In that case, it's a really good thing I didn't take you to the Deep South."

She kicks him under the table and he rolls his eyes at her.

He hears her giggle for the first time in years.

"I'm just saying," she continues, picking up her thread where she left it. "You can crash the best parties in all of time and space, but you can't pay for chips?"

"What, you want a lecture on the pros and cons of capitalism?" he questions. It's easier to joke than to explain his difficulties with money. It's so . . . primitive.

She's a good girl, knows how to take a joke and run with it. "Nah, gate crashing," she picks instead.

He decides to go along with it, to give her that lecture. Doesn't expect much of it, not really. He talks for a bit, tells her the basics, and then she's asking questions. She grins like she's not taking it seriously, but her questions, her eyes, the tilt of her head, all of it gives her away.

She's curious. She's curious and intelligent and asking questions that aren't half-stupid.

Not bad at all, this.

"What d'you do when they don't buy the psychic paper thing?" she questions, talking with her mouth full. "I mean, does it always work?" She frowns, stops chewing. "_How_ does it work, I guess I'm asking."

"Pretty simple, when you get down to it," he tells her, leaning back to watch her lean forward. "The mind reads it, but the eyes don't see it. If you're psychically aware or an absolute genius like me – or pay too much attention to your eyesight – then nope, doesn't work."

"So like," she starts, musing, "if you stuck it in a paper copier? Not gonna work. Or take a picture with a camera, yeah?"

He grins.

"What about a security camera?" she continues. "If you're watching it live, does it work?"

She's looking at him as if he knows everything there is, was, or ever will be. That's not love in her eyes, but awe isn't bad, as these things go.

He answers her as if it's the most mundane thing in the universe, because he's that impressive. "Depends on the camera, what sor' of memory storage you've got. Sentient ships and the like, they might capture the message. Takes a mind t' pick up on it."

"Sentient?" she repeats.

"Means being aware," he elaborates, helping himself to a few chips. "Just look at the TARDIS."

She stares at him. "Y'mean your ship's alive," she states flatly, disbelief clear on her face.

He's a bit insulted. "What else would she be?"

She's still staring at him. ". . . I'm not even going to answer that."

"What?"

Torn between incomprehensibly human emotions, she bites her lip and shakes her head before replying, half-laughing: "You are _such_ a bloody alien."

"Nope," he says simply. "You are."

She blinks, blinks and stares at him.

Wonders.

"Time Lord," she says at last, says it like she can't understand. "Lord of Time. You just showed me the end of the world, and I bought you _chips_." She looks at him like she's confused, like she doesn't know what's happening. Everything in the past day is catching up with her all over again, he can tell. She's completely overwhelmed and looking at him like she can't imagine he's real, like he's the only thing that has ever truly existed.

Has he ever looked at her like that? Did he, once?

"Yeah," he says, reaches across the table for her hand. She takes it immediately, two human-hot hands wrapping around his cooler one. "You did," he adds, making the effort to sound appreciative.

She turns his hand in her grip and he quiets for a time. Controlling his breathing is simple, easy. He'll say it is. The chips are forgotten as her fingers and eyes explore the lines of his palm, trace whorls and lines that could never belong in a human hand. She leaves salt and vinegar and grease and he wonders for a moment when she'll realize, if.

Once more, she turns his hand over, gently prompts his motion as if she doesn't wonder for a moment if he'll let her or not. He curls his fingers and she compares her knuckles to his. Her brow furrows, her eyes on his hand. "I thought . . ."

"What?" he asks, asks and breaks the moment.

She releases his hand quickly, seeming to realize only in that instant the extent of her actions. First he was a man, but now he's an alien and it doesn't look like she knows how to treat him when a moment goes soft.

"Just thought it'd be more obvious, I guess." She shrugs, tries for casual. "Species differences and all. I mean, those aliens before, they were _alien_-alien."

"What about me, then?" he asks, pulling off casual with far more skill than she does. He's had more time to practice.

"You're all in the details," she tells him after a moment of considering it. "Like your skin and stuff. You'd never know if you didn't touch."

They go back to eating and she yawns in mid-chew.

"Very pretty," he comments wryly, glancing at his watch. "How long've you been up?"

"Since this morning, s'all," she replies and now that he's looking, she does seem a touch tired. Or possibly just confused. "Okay, that _was_ this morning, for me. Woke up, ran into you again, left in the nighttime . . . saw the end of the world," she adds, putting a special emphasis on that, "and now we're here." She stops leaning towards him for the first time in their entire conversation, sits up straight and looks around. "What time's it, here?"

"Ten fourteen in the morning," he replies and when she laughs, he grins.

"Oh my god, this is crazy. This is so crazy." She laughs again, golden and bright. "I love it."

He can only watch her, only admire her joy and fight down the desire to touch, to brush his fingertips across her cheek, to run his hand through her long hair. "Want to go again?"

"Yeah," she answers immediately. "Definitely. First thing in the morning, yeah?"

"It's ten fourteen," he reminds her and she laughs as if she loves him.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Two trips and two rows. They don't quite fit together, not yet. He keeps expecting her to understand things but she doesn't.

He can only wonder when she will.

.-.-.-.-.-.

She's not so much sitting next to him as pressing into his side. She's half-asleep, he's sure of that, eyes closed and breathing steady.

He stops reading aloud, preferring to listen to her instead.

Her eyes open, a sleepy murmur falling from her lips. "Wha' happens next?"

"They all lived happily ever after," he tells her.

She drops her head onto his shoulder. "No they don't."

He'd pull back to give her a look if it didn't entail actually pulling away. Three days she's known him and already her faith in him is forming, her behavior around him increasingly comfortable. Three days. He'd loved her after three days. Before. Doesn't seem fair, that, but why would it be? "How would you know? Sleeping through the entire last chapter, you were."

"'Cause it's Dickens," she replies, her sleepy logic throwing that out first. "An' if the book's not done yet, there's not an ending yet, never mind the happily."

He presses a kiss to her hair before he can think not to. "Go back to sleep."

"Keep reading," she counters.

He can't deny her anything.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Not even a visit to her crazy, slapping mum.

.-.-.-.-.-.

. . . Now where'd he put that TARDIS key? He'd made it for her ages ago, years, a new key every time he changed the locks, and-

Ah, here it is!

Here and hers and now it's in her little human hands, exactly where it's always belonged.

.-.-.-.-.-.

It's a twisting crush of bodies in the closet, the explosion blasting away sound and stability. The choking tangle of their timelines releases him in the midst of the fiery ride, their entwined lives fitting back together in proper form.

That means she's going to live.

They're all yelling and screaming and crashing into one another, clutching at hands and arms and torsos for support. They're rocking about and two of three people here probably think they're going to die. But not him. Not now.

The threads of entwinement fail to snap, fail to break and drag him out of existence, out of this existence. He holds to her, keeps her close because he can't keep her safe.

The explosion wears itself out and the closet rattles to a groaning stop.

"Saved the world," she announces into the ringing silence, tells his jumper.

He gives her what's meant to be a brief hug, tightens his arms around her, her warm weight pressing against him. Her hands fist in his jumper and he wonders how she got her hands under his jacket. "So we have," he replies. Tracing her back with his fingertips, keeping contact to find her neck, her head, his hand finds her cheek and he kisses her brow. "Saved us, too," he tells her, tells his precious girl. "Fantastic! Give the girl a medal."

The third member of their trio speaks up in agreement. "A very good idea, Rose." She pauses, not knowing what else to say, and then settles on: "Thank you."

They stagger out into the sunlight and face the world they nearly lost.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He offers to help her unpack, just to see if she'll make him.

She shakes her head no, so he helps her anyway. She does need some explaining to, some quick little bits of information regarding closets and drawers when they're bigger on the inside, a walkthrough on how to use his sonomat washer-dryer.

After watching her empty out the red duffel – if he didn't know better, he'd say that it was bigger on the inside too – he stares a touch. "Travelin' light, are you?"

She gives him a look like he's being stupid. "There's a great big universe out there and you didn't tell me what to pack. 'm being prepared. 'Sides, it's not like you don't have the room."

"You're moving in," he realizes.

His tone makes her confidence waver, human ears misinterpreting Time Lord awe. "Thought I was, yeah."

He'll never let her go, he decides, promises himself for the thousandth of a thousand times.

"Fantastic."

He grins at her, and it's a thing of beauty when she grins back.

.-.-.-.-.-.

The woman he loves.

Even a Dalek can tell.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He clings to her, buries his face in her shoulder and clings. The last Dalek, gone from suicide instead of murder. The last Dalek, no more.

It's a victory and still he's frightened. Frightened? No, he's terrified.

He'd wandered about for a time before coming for her, explored parts of the universe on his own and decided that he knew the man he is now. He knows nothing, nothing at all.

And still she believes in him.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Of course, it would be too much to hope for a moment alone afterwards, wouldn't it?

.-.-.-.-.-.

Her tagalong faints and he's nearly satisfied.

"He's your boyfriend," he says to hear her deny it.

She does. "Not anymore."

It's almost good enough, he thinks, looking at the useless lump on the floor. "Why him?"

She bites her lip like she's not sure of that herself. "Shouldn't we, I dunno, check to see if he's okay?"

Rolling his eyes, he crouches down, checks for a pulse. "Just fainted," he replies. "Bumped his head a little on the way down, but nothing serious." He looks up at her. "Why him?"

She shrugs and if he weren't so annoyed at how she was treating this, he might be glad she cares so little about the cowardly git. "He kept going on about seeing the stars and working with all that alien junk in that base. Just sort of thought . . . I dunno."

He leaves it at that for the moment, moves the boy before someone can notice and complain at him. This isn't a conversation he wants to have around the prone body of an especially stupid ape.

When she fusses, it annoys him.

"He'll be up in a couple of minutes. Honestly, if he can't take looking out a window-"

"I know why," she interrupts. "I think I do."

He looks at her, crosses his ankles as he leans against the wall. There's patience within him, patience unlike any a human could comprehend, but he doesn't look it. He knows he doesn't look it and that's intentional. "Do you now."

She looks down, but not at the human lump. "He was goin' on about stuff, how smart he was and how amazing his job was. Guess I wanted to prove a point." She laughs a little, at herself, and it's the first time he hasn't loved the sound. It's the joy he loves, then. "Proved it the other way, now that I stop to think about it."

"Prove what?" he questions, arms folded.

It's a moment before she says it. "Wanted to prove I'm not stupid."

He blinks. "Who says you are? Did he?" He kicks the lump lightly on the shoulder, nudges him with his foot.

"No, no, I just-" She swallows, looks up, looks into his eyes. "I dropped out of school, yeah? When I was younger. There was this bloke an'-" She looks away from the fire in his gaze. "Yeah, I know. Stupid."

"He's the one who can't look out a window, Rose," he replies.

She laughs, and this time she means it. "Yeah, good point." A few steps take her to said window and she gazes down upon her planet. "An' it's not like it's the view we had last time."

"Might be just as bright, if the station was passing over the nightside." He pushes off of the wall with his shoulder, stands at her side and just a little behind her.

She looks up at him, suddenly shy. "Sorry," she says, referring to the unconscious lump.

"Be better if you talked it over with me first," he tells her as lightly as he can, "before you invite some stupid ape into my third heart."

Only when her look of apology turns to a look of confusion does he realize what he's said. "Your what?" she asks.

"It's a term of endearment for a TARDIS," he answers, shrugging. And it's not a term he's used in a very long while. She brings it out of him, the man he used to be. And that's good. It's better than bad, at any rate.

"Your _third_ heart," she repeats. "Where's your second one?"

"Next to the first one," he replies, giving her a look. "Where else would I keep it?"

"You're joking," she tells him, doesn't seem able to think otherwise.

"Oi!" he protests. "I think I would know my own biology."

"If you've got nine hundred years to get used to it, I'd think so too." She grins, giving him her tongue-touched smile.

He grins back and hopes she never finds out he was lying about his age. He'd turned nine hundred years mature three bodies ago. "Now here's something fun," he says instead. "Gadget boy here's from 2012 and in his very early twenties. You, on the other hand . . ." He trails off to let her do the math.

It takes her longer than she should, but once she does . . . Oh, once she does. The lump's now a source of amusement, nothing more, that short-term attraction cut dead. "Oh my god, he's a bratty little teenager!"

"Still is, by the look of him," he adds and she shoves him lightly on the shoulder. He's going to tease her mercilessly, he decides, going to playfully approve until she has to reject the idea of the tagalong completely.

"What about you, then?" she asks, her eyes lighting up the way they always do when she speaks of time. "If you were from . . . the year 2880-something? 2880-something, we'd be the same age. Sort of."

"You're from my past," he tells her, nods slowly.

She bites her lip, considering. ". . . Yeah, this is givin' me a headache." Eyeing his chest, that lip stays bitten. "D'you really have two hearts?"

He rolls his eyes as he takes her hands, scoffs a bit about certain members of certain species as he presses each palm over a heart. Her eyes widen, her mouth falling open. Even after he's let her go, she stays as she is, feeling the beat of his life thrum against her hands. Her gaze jumps from her hands on his jumper to his face, from his hearts to his eyes, back and forth, and then she closes her eyes.

She closes her eyes and she tilts her head and it's like she's trying to listen even though his heartsbeats are much to soft for her ears to pick up without her head against his chest. Her heat burns through his jumper, her fingers moving ever so slightly. "How fast . . . ?" she asks, leaning towards him as if her pressing an ear to him isn't entirely out of the question.

He doesn't answer, merely turns his head to look at the newly conscious tagalong. The boy stares back at him, eyes wide and he knows exactly what he must look like, what they must look like.

Her fascination makes her _his_; her posture makes her appear wanting. It's in her face and in her body and he knows how he's standing as well, possessive and dominant and beyond human thought. He knows the picture they must make, standing before this view of an alien Earth.

He's done things neither of them could imagine, but it's still a heady rush, knowing he can keep her as his.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Valiant.

From _valere_, meaning to have power.

__

"Over you?" she asked him once, will ask him.

Yes.

She does.

.-.-.-.-.-.

"And you're not going to abuse that, are you?" he asks her, cradling her in his arm after she's brought about the end of the world via paradox. "Are you? No you're not."

She's so small as a baby, so small, so tiny and she holds his one finger with all of her hand. Bright eyes focusing on his face, she gurgles happily, recognizing him long before she knows him. He'd like to think so, even if he knows that she can't sense it, could never sense the tangled mess their timelines have become.

Only a baby and he's still hers.

"Glad you're happy," he tells her, letting none of his sarcasm into his voice. She's responding to tone, smiling at his voice. "Somebody should be. You've gone off again, Rose. Wandered off with 'the most important man in your life.' Three guesses who that is, first two don't count."

Her head lolls back against his arm, his girl yawning like the infant she is.

"Here's a hint," he confides, readjusting so as to better support her. "It's not me."

A scrunch of her nose tells him that she dislikes his tone, can hear his bitterness.

He's allowed to be bitter, him. Reduced to literally robbing the cradle? Hard to get lower than that. All the same, he softens his tone once more, tries to speak in the way she likes.

"I need to stop thinking that you understand," he tells her. "You don't. Just a little human child, you are. Haven't explained a thing to you, have I?"

The shrieks of Reapers penetrate the church walls and the baby begins to wail.

It's half impending doom, half simple need for a nap. Humans, sleeping their lives away. "Shh . . . Shh . . . Got you now."

He rocks her against his shoulder, her tiny body held with only one arm, her fragile head supported by one hand. In an attempt to not bring the wrath of her mother down upon him – the last thing he needs now is a slap – he bounces her as if he were the TARDIS until the wails fade into gurgling giggles. "Lifelong trait, this," he remarks, informs her with a serious look into eyes bright and small. "Hurl you about, and you come up laughing."

Suddenly unnerved with himself, he lays her down, tucks her back into her carrier. It's not like this is domestic, though – it's her and paradoxical and full of danger. Not domestic at all.

She smiles at him sleepily.

He taps her lightly on the nose. "An' you said your childhood was boring."

Nose wrinkled, the baby yawns as if in agreement.

"Good standard you've got there." He very nearly smiles, very nearly forgets the moment.

Gurgling quietly, she watches him with half-open eyes, mouth falling open slowly. She's utterly unaware of the behavior of their timelines, of how hers is breaking loose from his, of how his is fraying like the old rope it is. If this goes on much longer, his own paradox is going to let the Reapers in, let them in or destroy them or bring yet more of the temporal creatures down on them.

". . . I don't know how I'm going to save you," he tells her quietly, gently pulling her thumb out of her mouth. "You stupid, stupid ape."

.-.-.-.-.-.

For a time, he doesn't exist.

But if he did, he would hope she was safe.

.-.-.-.-.-.

She cries in his arms as he once cried in hers.

They make it back into the TARDIS before numbness wears away, make it all the way into the galley, make it all the way to having a cuppa, and then she breaks down.

He moves in a way he doesn't understand, moves to her side and pulls the mug gently from her hands to set it down before she can burn herself. Shoulders shaking, she clutches at his arm and he gives it to her, kneels beside her chair and enfolds her in a solid embrace. Bouncing her won't work this time, no rollicking ride in the TARDIS to cheer her up.

He doesn't know what to do.

Pressing her face into his shoulder, she releases his sleeve to throw her arms around his neck, shaking and sobbing. Her fingers try to grip at his jacket, try to bunch the thick material, and he considers taking it off for an instant, considers giving her something easier to clutch at.

Deciding it a bad idea, he simply holds her, tense and uncomfortable and helpless. "Shh . . ." He rubs her back a little, remembering vaguely her doing it to him. "Shh . . . Got you now."

Hiccuping and sniffling and holding onto him as if he's the only solid thing there's left, she mumbles out words he can't catch, can't make sense of. She's talking to his lapel, crying into it. There's no pulling back to see her face, to hear her words; there's no distance between them, none allowed.

The tears subside slowly, leaving both of them drained. He feels the moment they stop, the moment when she lets go and gives herself over to whatever mystifying human process would pull her through this. She's lost her father again, seen him die twice in one day. And she seems to accept it. Tension flows out of her, her warm weight pressing down on him as she stops supporting herself.

She tries to speak and sets herself off again. "I – oh god, I . . . I- I lo- I _lost_ you," she sobs, arms tight around him. "You were _dead_."

There's nothing he can say, no words to tell her that the near-catastrophe wasn't her fault. He holds her instead, keeps her close even as his knees protest his kneeling on the galley floor. "An' now I'm alive." Maybe he can take away that guilt, at least.

She sniffles. "Yeah, but . . ."

"Oi!" he protests, all indignation, radiating effrontery that he knows she can't take seriously. "You calling me a corpse? Thought you would've learned what a zombie looks like by now."

She makes a noise that might just be a chuckle. "S'not what I'm talking about and you know it." Pulling back, she bites her lip. Touches his face.

He doesn't lean into it, simply allows it. Less would drive her away, more would frighten her or, far worse, take advantage of her state. She maps his features, marvels at him as if he couldn't possibly be real. Make-up and tears still mix on her cheeks; her eyes are still very red. She's balancing on the edge of both heartsache and relief and he doesn't know how to pull her to his side.

"I lost you," she tells him again, an emotion behind the words that he knows very well. "I lost you an' you were gone an' – an' I didn't think you were coming back."

It would be unbearably domestic if it weren't her. "An' I did, in case you didn't notice," he replies, cupping her wet cheek, still unused to the sight of these hands touching her.

Biting her lip, she says nothing, only looks at him with an intensity that could one day outstrip even his. He can practically hear her thinking, but the TARDIS has never been one for translating internal monologue. She doesn't cradle his hand between hers and her cheek, doesn't cradle but claim it, hold to him as if having decided that she'll never let go.

And maybe she has.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He's not a violent man, as a rule.

He's also both technically asexual and sexually active – by species standards – which is a pretty clear indicator of how well rules apply to him.

Violence has always equated with stupidity in his mind, with last resorts and final gambits and brave acts of idiocy at best, with senseless destruction at worst.

Now, it's starting to equate with possessiveness.

But no matter what, he is who he is and he's smarter than that. If she's going to go around with the scent of arousal clinging to her, he's going to make her newest tagalong look like an idiot until she stops. Shouldn't be difficult. It's worked before and he's always thought it would work again.

Except this time it doesn't.

Except this time instead of pressing her hands to his hearts, she tells him he's not a man. Not like her flash little captain with his pockets loaded with gimmicky gadgets. _Never_ trust gimmicky gadgets, he's always said. And don't trust those who live by them, he wants to add.

He's just going to stand here and resonate concrete. She'll see. He'll get them out where the captain has abandoned them. She'll see.

. . . Why's she turning the music up?

.-.-.-.-.-.

"So," the captain says.

Working under the console, he doesn't respond, doesn't react to the poor excuse for a conversation starter.

"Believe it or not," the captain says, "I've seen a non-linear relationship before."

His insides freeze, but his voice gives nothing away besides sarcasm. "Good for you. Make yourself useful and hand me that spanner." The tool is put into his outstretched hand and he replies with a grunt instead of a thank-you.

"Look, it's not like I meant to pry into this. I just thought something was off, that's all. I ran a quick, standard-procedure temporal scan with my wrist strap – you can stop rolling your eyes – and that's what it turned up." The captain hunkers down next to him and the Time Lord is almost impressed and a little surprised. He had rolled his eyes, at that. "How the hell do the timelines of a Time Lord and a twenty-first century shopgirl get that tangled up?"

"You're the one with the gadgets, captain. You tell me." There's a hardness in his voice now, a hardness in all of him. He doesn't know what the conman plans to do with this information, what he might have already done.

"No idea. The last one I saw was a really simple loop. A pair of one-night stands – slightly confusing but nothing big." The sounds of the wrist computer being used reach his ears. The conman whistles. "Yours is huge."

"Stop flirting, captain," he replies, falsely playful. "Not going to get you anywhere."

The human chuckles lightly. "Yeah, that's what Rose thinks too."

He looks up at the man.

"Okay, tell me if I'm wrong: if you make her fall in love with you, that's cheating. So instead, you've just been spinning her around to see who she'll gravitate towards. Letting it happen naturally." The captain watches his face as he speaks, tries to search for truth in guarded eyes. It's unnerving, the way he might see it. "That's sweet and all, but if it backfires, that paradox is going to rip a chunk of the universe out, not to mention you."

It's a moment before he replies, before he goes back under the console. "That's her choice."

"Yeah, and by the look of things? She doesn't have a clue she's making it."

The hum of the TARDIS sounds between them, heightens the silence between the men. The captain doesn't realize that this is the point, that she can't know she's making it. Forcing her love would be worse than not having it – from his perspective. From the point of view of the universe, it doesn't matter one single inch.

But it does matter. It's all that matters, some days.

And through his silence on the subject, the younger man seems to understand. ". . . That has to be the most stupidly romantic thing I've ever heard."

He laughs and surprises himself. "Not something I've been accused of often, that."

The captain sounds as if he doesn't doubt that. "You don't exactly look like the type. And just so you know, I'm not about to go spilling the deep dark secret to your girl. I'm just saying that it's a problem, you leaving it to her to choose when you're not even putting yourself on the menu."

It's a fair point, but he doesn't have to admit it. "And you've got a better idea?"

"I'll think of one. You know, beyond the basics. Less of the asexual act, more Glen Miller. Hell, as it is, the sexual tension in here is driving me up the wall." He can hear the human shifting and then he can hear the human's grin. "Hey, just a thought, but if I lock the pair of you in a closet for a couple hours, would that qualify as saving the universe?"

"Sonic screwdriver," he replies, poking an obvious hole through that plan. "Wouldn't work."

There's a short, thoughtful silence. "What if I stuck a chair under the doorknob?"

He rolls his eyes. "Captain?"

"Yeah?" Suddenly tentative, might be.

"Make yourself useful and give me a hand with this wiring."

They get along well after that.

.-.-.-.-.-.

In hindsight, forgetting about her idiot boyfriend was a mistake.

The captain thinks he's crazy for not going after them and the Time Lord silently agrees – not that he's going to admit to it. But the entwinement isn't choking him, isn't fraying at the threads of his timeline. He doesn't understand why it feels as comfortable as ever. When the captain appeared on the scene, he'd felt it immediately, known something was wrong.

The tangled mess of their timelines helps him find her, helps him know which way to move to keep her safe and whole, how to act to keep the lot of it from falling apart. And it tells him when she's being seduced away from him.

She's gone off with her boyfriend, but . . . there's nothing. No threat, no urgency, no . . . . There's nothing, just her and him, lives entwined.

He doesn't understand, simply hopes.

.-.-.-.-.-.

She sits down next to him on the bench outside of the hatchery, leaving the ex-Time Agent to expertly scam the paperwork for the egg. "Y'know," she says, musing over the thought with more concentration than is strictly necessary, "you never hear people say things like 'it's lovely this time of year on Raxacoricofallapatorius.'"

He glances at her, arms folded across his chest. "Suppose you don't."

"Do you-" She stops as quickly as she's started, looking at his crossed arms out of the corner of her eyes. Under his undisguised gaze, she glances up to his face, a red tinge crossing her features before she looks down into her lap, suddenly shy.

That's new. Interest piqued and an eye on their entwinement, he asks, "Do I what?"

Recovering her confidence, she matches his gaze, stops biting her lip. "D'you want t' do something later? Just the two of us."

He raises his eyebrows, hearts tripping all over each other in their attempt to race. "Where're we leaving the captain?"

"There was this big sign for some sort of antique spaceship show," she answers simply. "You should have seen his face light up."

Good man, knowing when to bow out. He doesn't doubt for a moment that the captain's absence is intentional. "Loves his gadgets, that one."

"Yeah, he does," she replies, laughing a little. Far too soon, she sobers. "'Course, if you want t' go take a look too . . ."

He shakes his head, scoffing a bit at that idea. It doesn't sound half-bad actually, but if the captain's bent on pressing this opportunity into his hands, he's not about to throw it back in the man's face. "Why look at 'em when they're old and dusty when you can see them when they're new?"

"Right, yeah," she agrees quickly, very quickly. "You wouldn't- right."

They sit together in silence and she very nearly reaches for him. She pulls back instead to hand him a hurried confession:

"I broke up with Mickey."

He very nearly manages to come off sounding casual. Of course, anything would sound casual in comparison with her. "Did you now?"

"Yeah," she answers, waiting for him to do something, say something. "Left him a long while back, just . . . made it official, I guess."

"Did you now?" he repeats without noticing the repetition.

"Yeah," she answers again, more strongly this time. "I did. 'M not even on the rebound or anything."

He looks at her, his arms still carefully folded.

She matches his gaze, raising her chin, daring him to doubt.

Grinning, he stands. "C'mon, then," he orders, holding out his hand. "I've heard it's lovely on Raxacoricofallapatorius this time of year."

"Fantastic," she agrees, corrects as she rises to stand at his side.

She takes his hand.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He doesn't kiss her that night, doesn't rush, doesn't need to guide her back to him when she's already here. The noose of their entwinement has loosened around his neck, has become so light and promises such a safe fulfillment of their timeloop that a heady sort of euphoria can be the only result.

Or maybe it's just her, just her being his.

.-.-.-.-.-.

And then she's dead.

.-.-.-.-.-.

It's fast and sudden and all that's left of her is a pile of dust on a space station orbiting a poisoned Earth.

For a time, he doesn't exist.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He doesn't exist, not as a man, not as a Time Lord, not as himself, simply as a creature of rational illogic and silent grief and quieter rage and just a little madness.

He feels their timelines pulling, twisting, being yanked apart and he thinks that his time is soon to come, very soon, knows that the end has come. Knows that he's failed her more completely than anyone else has or ever will.

It's tearing slowly, so slowly, so maddeningly slowly that he knows he will break long before he fades. He knows this without fearing it, knows through a numbing fog. Knows and doesn't understand and so stops himself from feeling because what he's feeling can't be true.

It feels like she's alive.

.-.-.-.-.-.

She is.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He saves her.

He saves her from the Daleks and then he saves her from himself.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He sends the TARDIS back to her Earth, sends his timeship back with her in it. His third heart and, now, his fourth: both gone.

Both safe.

And that's what matters.

Emergency Programme One will explain enough to her to get her home, he knows, but not enough to keep her there, not with the TARDIS with her. Even as he works on the Delta wave, the majority of his mind is wrapped around her, around the backup plans and emergency protocols he's created for situations just like this.

The TARDIS will take her home, will remain open to her as a database until his girl is old enough, until she cuts her hair and hones her audacity. After that, his ship will open up again, come to life for four final trips. He knows he hasn't explained things well, hasn't told her half of anything in the recordings he left, can only hope that the TARDIS will give her some sort of clarification.

A bitter smile touches his lips, one of the last expressions he believes he'll have. He doesn't need to hope: he already knows this will work. Fearing that he'll feel them change, he doesn't look too closely at his own memories, simply knows that he still has them in one form or another. That's enough. It has to be.

He fills his head with thoughts of her, centers his mind around her even as he hurries to complete his doomsday device. It will kill him too – he has no doubt of that. It will kill him and the captain and the Earth and all of the Daleks in one blow, a victory completely bitter and not at all sweet.

But it won't kill her. She'll have outlived him and that's- that's- that's fantastic. He's seen her die once and knows he could never do it again. She'll live her little human life and he's about to die and he can accept that, could almost accept all of it except for the fact that he can't.

When he's the last truly living thing on the Gamestation, the Daleks approach.

He'll kill them this time. He will, he'll do it. He failed, before, but never again. He'll do it. He will.

He's a good liar in this incarnation: he almost believes it. Doesn't.

There's nothing worth believing in, not when she's gone, held safe and far away in the last moments of his life.

He closes his eyes, waits for his death, and hears the heartsbeat of the universe, of his universe coming back to him.

This isn't supposed to happen. This isn't what he planned. It's wrong, all wrong, but time is singing around him, he can feelit, stronger than the turn of any world, he can _feel_ it. Something's happening, something beyond him, something completely beyond him and when it turns out to be her, he feels as if he's known it all along.

She appears, emerging through the TARDIS, bright and shining and mystifying and fantastic and so strong as to terrify him. She's more than herself, more than the woman he loves and he's afraid, so afraid that she will never lessen, never return to her humanity.

"My Doctor," she calls him, and he is. Whatever she becomes, he is.

She destroys the Daleks, ends the Time War before she witnesses its beginning. With a wave of her hand, she reduces them to dust, strips the semblance of life out of their metal shells. But she's burning, burning from the inside out, filled to the brim with power even she cannot hold.

And he knows what he has to do.

In that instant when he looks into her eyes, when he brings her to him, he sees her, sees _her_, sees the woman she's always been, will always be. And she knows him, as he knows her. She's scattered words through time and space, thrown a name into the Vortex that he doesn't accept as hers.

What else has she done? When else has she touched with her impossible reach? Her timeline shines, burns, gives him no guidance as to what has happened, as to what will. So long as he can save her, keep her with him, he doesn't care.

He kisses her for the first time and prays it won't be the last.


	6. Chapter 6

VI.

She has no idea what she's done and neither does he. Did she cast herself back through time, scatter the Valiant Child along with the Bad Wolf? The second was a self-fulfillment paradox, yet the first . . . . He still doesn't know where that name comes from, will come from.

There's a flaw in this assumption, an obvious flaw in assuming it's over. It can't be finished, not so easily, not with the conditions of their entwinement yet to be fulfilled. It's still there, pulling at him, tugging at him, tightening around him with each wrong move and relaxing when he goes the right way. The loop isn't closed, is still open to the influences of their actions, is still able to guide him.

Not that he needs the extra help in figuring out the current problem.

"Rose, it's _me_."

.-.-.-.-.-.

This is one of those things he really should have mentioned in advance, isn't it?

.-.-.-.-.-.

He's half under the console when she walks in, tinkering away as her footsteps ring on the grating. It's an oddly familiar situation for him, recently regenerated and needing to repair his TARDIS. Maybe she's here to help again – she's certainly not here to let him shag her again, not yet – or maybe she's here to get away from her mother.

He can certainly relate to that. What _is_ it with that woman? Hating him and hating him and hating him and suddenly, just because he's a new man, she decides she'd rather coddle him. Coddle him! _Him!_ Total lunatic, her mother.

She asks him something and he doesn't quite catch it.

Pulling himself out from beneath his workplace, he raises his eyebrows at her. "Hm?"

"How bad is it?" she repeats. "The damage, I mean."

"We've had worse," he admits after a moment, stroking the underside of the console. "Let her rest up a bit and we'll be off in no time."

She nods a bit as she replies, doesn't move from the jump seat. "Good. That's- that's good, yeah."

There's a moment of awkward, strained silence. They break it in mismatched unison.

Him: "D'you-"

Her: "Can I-"

"Can you what?" he asks, picking her question to go with. He's already forgotten what his was meant to be.

She shakes her head, looks down. "Never mind. It's- It was just a thought."

"Nothing wrong with thoughts," he answers. "Generally in favour of them, myself. All that . . . thinking. Pondering. Musing. Mulling over-"

He's babbling again.

"And whatnot," he concludes somewhat lamely. He ruffles his own hair, wondering what he's going to do with this unstoppable gob he's suddenly acquired.

She seems to be wondering, too. "Are you always going to do that now?"

"I'm trying not to," he admits. "But then again, I've never had a body quirk I could control all the way. A tendency for hats, an unexpected fondness for cricket, a short period of being spontaneously musical – you know, I used to play the spoons. Never learned how, just picked up a pair and played the _spoons_. Hit myself on the head, too. Not highly recommended that soon after regeneration. The brain's barely done getting itself all brain-shaped again – I wound up mucking up idioms for years, _years_, just because of those spoons-"

Clapping a hand over his mouth, he attempts to swallow his own tongue. He's not looking at her when he lowers his hand, when he asks, "What was the question again?" And then he dares a glance.

There's a moderately epic battle going on to keep her face straight. It's obvious enough for him to be able to tell, done well enough that she nearly manages. "Are you always going to babble like that?"

He holds up his hand, gesturing for just one second to compose himself. "Yes," he says very carefully. "Quite possibly."

Shoulders shaking, hands pressed over her face, she makes a sound.

It takes him a moment, but he realizes that she's laughing.

"It's not funny!" he protests. "It's new and unintentional and these teeth _still_ don't feel right!"

She laughs some more.

He waits her out and has the oddest feeling that he's sulking. _Sulking_? He doesn't sulk. Or does he? Is he a sulking man now? He was a brooder before, he could brood up a storm, last him. He was just getting used to it, the brooding, and now he has to sulk.

Realizing that he could very easily sulk over sulking, he abandons that train of thought.

"Right, well, if you're going to be like that, all . . . laughing," he tells her, lowering himself back under the console, "I'm going back to repairs."

She says his name, calls him by it.

He comes back out, watching her approach, gazing up at her with his back on the grating and his skinny new legs sticking out. Suddenly, he can imagine what a newborn colt feels like, all gangly limbs and oddly skittish. She hunkers down next to him and he sits up.

"Can I?" she asks again.

"Yes," he says without knowing what he's answering to.

Taking her bottom lip between her teeth – and how he wants to do that for her – she raises her hand carefully, touches his face. Fresh nerves tingle and he closes his eyes, nodding so very slightly, nodding and not nuzzling. There's a difference, he's sure there is.

The pad of her thumb brushes over his cheekbones, strokes back and forth and back and forth and he knows what she's doing, knows that she's acclimatizing and learning who he is now, he _knows_ that but it doesn't help. She touches his sideburns but doesn't run her fingers through his hair. She explores the lines of his face with a ghosting light touch, never brushing her fingertips over his lips.

The ways she doesn't touch him are more deliberate than the ways she does.

He opens his eyes when he feels her gentle breath on his face, on his lips. "It's still me," he tells her quietly, the first soft and quiet words he's spoken in this body.

She pulls back, but she doesn't jerk away from a familiar gaze in unfamiliar eyes. There's a difference, a very important difference between giving space and needing it. "I know," she says and then looks nearly surprised at her own conviction.

He smiles at her and it's a thing of beauty when she smiles back.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Blimey, this body is _bouncy_! And tactile. Blimey, it's tactile. He wants to touch and hold and swing her around in his arms, crush her against his body for the sheer joy of it.

He feels different, strange, almost repaired. He feels like he could do almost anything, even if he isn't ginger-

Oh! _Oh!_ Chestnut and not rude!

Ha!

.-.-.-.-.-.

It takes barely no time at all before all is back as it should be. Well, more or less. Well, he says more or less, he means sort of.

Well . . .

Okay, fine. Give him a minute, he's taking care of it. It'll be fine. Besides that little incident on New Earth, he's not even confused. He just has to sort out everything he's told her from everything she doesn't know he's told her. Once he does that, things'll get better. They will, of course. Just look at that entwinement, all loose and natural feeling and, and yes, he still doesn't know how he's going to fulfill that little bit.

So far, he's considered the following:

"Evidently, I'm going to bring you back in time to introduce you to my younger self. He's a bit of all right even if he's got a hell of a sweet tooth. You'll get on fine. Better than fine. In fact, you have to. Right, yes, that's a little skeevy, I know. Oh, and while I'm at it, we should probably have loads of sexual intercourse first. Just so you're not surprised by my biology. Care to straddle me?"

Somehow, that's striking him as a bit of a bad idea. Just a touch. A smidgen.

For the time being, he's trusting the entwinement, making decisions as best he can as to keep the noose of their timelines from tightening around his neck. Their necks, really, even if she can't feel it. And yes, all right, fine, it's a long shot, but it's worked before.

It'll work.

He's almost positive.

.-.-.-.-.-.

No, really, he is.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Ish.

.-.-.-.-.-.

It's dangerously close to routine, the way they cuddle up together after a hard pseudo-day's work of planet-saving. But that's him, isn't it, always living on the dangerous side.

The dangerous side of the couch, as it is, but that's hardly a fair example. Now look at what they did earlier that day, eh? That, good example. This, a consistently repeating fluke.

It's been a long enough day for his little human to get all tired out, to muss up her hair a bit and leave her more than willing to sit next to him for an informational babble. Her breathing calm and steady, she looks up at him with half-lidded eyes, smiling at him in the way she does when she's not entirely awake. Well, when she's not entirely awake and he hasn't done something to inspire her non-morning person tendencies.

That's a shame, really, her not being a morning person. It's a bit because she's never fully appreciated his explanations on how there aren't mornings inside the TARDIS, but it's mostly because she's adorable when she's in partial states of consciousness. Clothing rumpled and her bed-head a hopeless case, she was almost too much for him to look at, too close to the woman she would become for any sense of restraint on his part.

Her fingers trail over the sleeve of his suit jacket. It's a small, sleepy act with her pressed against his side and were it not for the fact that he's currently wearing that jacket, he probably wouldn't be so fixated on this. Such a light pressure, such a small motion: through two layers of clothing, he can barely feel it. All the same, the manly hairs on his manly hairy arm are rising up, feel as if they are, straining towards her touch.

Her head is on his shoulder and when she speaks, he can feel the motion of her jaw. "Yeah?" she asks him, sounding for all the worlds as if she were already asleep.

"Yes?" he asks right back, a soft murmur as he turns his head just so, just enough to look at the top of her head and feel the brush of her hair against his chin.

She squirms a little there, presses into him and looks up with her face so close to his. "You stopped talking," she says.

"I do that sometimes," he replies without thinking, too caught up in looking at her for thought.

She giggles, nudges him in the side with her arm. "No you don't," she contradicts, smiling up at him and at this distance, he can taste the texture of her words.

"Sometimes," he repeats, feeling the heat of her hand through two layers of cloth.

They both stop talking then, watching one another, gazing into the other's eyes and getting lost therein. The manner of her touch changes, idle stroking of his sleeve becoming deliberate. It could be deliberate. That look on her face, the flush of her cheek and darkness of her eyes, that could be true.

He waits for her, as he always has.

He waits, but they stay as they are, willingly locked in warm gazes. He could look away, could break this moment as he's broken others. She wasn't ready then, he's claimed to himself. He was just imagining it, he makes himself believe without wanting to. But tonight, but this, this could be real, could happen.

There's a step she needs to make on her own, a leap he pretends to know she can't stumble over. If she doesn't love him on her own, she doesn't love him. And just thinking of the possibility pains him.

"Are you all right?" she asks him, brow furrowing, body warming his.

He just had a moment of cosmic angst, that and a moment of absolute terror. His answer is obvious: "Of course I'm all right."

She looks at him as if she doesn't believe him – which makes sense, considering she doesn't.

He continues speaking, his "sometime" of quiet used up. "But you, _you_," he emphasizes, placing his hand over hers on his arm, "should be off to sleep. You're no fun at all when you're exhausted and we've got a busy day tomorrow!"

If she were more awake, her smile would be a grin. "Yeah?" Dark, half-hooded eyes practically sparkle. "You've got something planned?"

"Maybe," he tells her and it's not a lie. "Now go to bed."

She kisses him goodnight.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Chaste and light, the soft, firm pressure of her lips against his. Gentle and quiet, perfectly understated.

He wonders how she can be so nervous in conscious intimacy and so natural in this. How is it that she can worry over the small things – holding hands in his pocket when she forgets gloves on an ice planet, that sort of thing – and yet be infinitely relaxed about kissing him?

It makes no sense, but then, she doesn't either, never has. Not in bed, not out of bed, not even approaching bed.

Every night, she kisses him, light and gentle, tongues never venturing into play. Beyond the contact of their lips, she doesn't touch him, doesn't so much as touch his face or wrap her arms around his neck. It seems oddly as if – but no, that doesn't make sense.

He's fairly certain that she would know it when she kisses him. She does it without thinking, like it's as natural as breathing, and, once that stops making him too absurdly happy to concentrate, he'll work out what it means. The issue of the Bad Wolf is still looming over him, still frightening him at times.

__

". . . all that is, all that was, all that could ever be."

How much memory of it does she still have? How much of her future and his past did she see? How much has that singularly monumental act changed her?

He wonders and frets and she kisses him goodnight.

.-.-.-.-.-.

The press of her body against his is delightful. Delectable. Not to mention desirable.

He swings her about just because he can, laughing with her when her joy bursts out of her, brushes almost tangibly past his ear. His arms tighten around her waist, hers wrap around his neck.

They're alive and happy and nothing can pull them apart, not now or ever and when he tells her of his love, he does it in ways she doesn't understand.

His hands on her back and his lips at her ear: both are good, simple human indicators. But he doesn't speak to her differently, doesn't mutter sweet nothings or anything of the sort. That would be stupid, not to mention idiotic. He's not that kind of a man.

Actions are carrying them forward and yet they haven't gone anywhere. It's nothing official, nothing recognized by both parties.

He's still not sure she's realized, not sure she knows what she's begun to do.

It's impossible, but then, so are they.

.-.-.-.-.-.

"What? Sorry, sorta zoned out for a mo'. Keep getting this feeling, y'know, like there's something I'm forgetting to do, yeah? Probably just tired."

She gives him a kiss and a night filled with worry.

.-.-.-.-.-.

It's another day and another gleeful hug.

Back in the TARDIS, flushed and excited from a brush with danger or the unknown or both, she's too fantastic not to hug, not to sweep up into his arms. She reaches for him, bounds over to him and joyfully throws herself into his embrace.

He adores the sounds she makes when he crushes her against him, when he holds her tight and she holds him tighter. He wants to laugh and dance about and spin her along with him, wants to dance with her _and_ to dance with her, thinks she might have at least thought about the idea by now.

Her warmth pressing against him, it's not too long before he must set her down, return her to her feet before his body betrays him. She smiles up at him, arms still around his neck.

"Hello," he says, greets that smile.

Beaming at him, she rises up, pulls his head down as if it's a natural motion for her. He wants it to be, can't understand how it became one. He leans in, expects soft and chaste and finds firm and insistent instead.

She tugs his lip between hers and he opens his mouth in grateful surrender. Hands pulling at one another, their kiss pauses in a jarring counterpoint, both realizing their own actions and waiting upon the other. The tip of her tongue touches his, a hesitant brush he returns.

Her warm hands buried in his hair, her fingertips touch his scalp, rub and massage and he groans just a little, arms tightening around her. Hesitancy vanishes, her tongue thrusting into his mouth to tangle with his.

An old song fills his ears, a song of celebration on a planet terrified of darkness and night. It fills his ears as she fills his hearts, as entwinement thrums around them in harmony. The angles between them have changed, his very body, all of his perceptions of her; so much altered and yet this is the same, will always be the same.

Full-circle. Almost but not quite. Soon.

Soon.

She breaks for air, breathing deeply, her heart pounding in that strangely slow way human hearts have. Leaning against him for support, her eyes are glassy, her smile that of a dreaming lover. The smell of her arousal alone is enough to make him dizzy. He wants to bury his face against her, lick and suck and sample the tempting taste of her. Oh, he wants to.

"Hello," she replies and then blinks as if waking, as if confused by what they've done. She's touched her own future, slips into mannerisms and behaviors she has yet to form. Small wonder she's confused. "I . . ."

Her eyes are wide, wide and dark and suddenly frightened. He sees guilt and longing and embarrassment and he can't understand what's going on in her little human head.

"Yes, Rose?" he asks softly, his arms around her light and protective both. She's pulling away, retreating, and it's not something he can comprehend.

She looks at him as if she doesn't understand either, doesn't see how he can miss what must be to her an obvious problem. But he's not human and so he doesn't quite get it, can't quite make that twisting mental leap. Emotional leap? What's going on now?

Her gaze flickers to his lips, her cheeks flushing further, and it slots into place.

"Oh," he says, "right." But really, if she was talking about that, she really should have referred to it in a way that made sense. With bouncing or glee or whatnot. It's confusing, not to mention mystifying.

"Yeah," she says, strangely muted and nervous.

It occurs to him that she doesn't know he loves her. This is, perhaps, the strangest thought he's had in over a decade. Of course she knows. He's never had to tell her, not once. It's something she knows, some strange bit of innate knowledge imbedded in her brain.

But maybe he was wrong.

"That was fun," he tells her brightly, grinning at her like an idiot because she always smiles back when he does. "Care for another go?"

"You, wha- Yeah." She takes a breath and lets it out slowly, returning her hands to his shoulders. There's awe in her eyes and something that might just be love or at least minor adoration and he still doesn't understand what he's done. "Yeah."

He snogs her within an inch of her life and then she returns the favor.

.-.-.-.-.-.

This happens with a surprising frequency from then on, actually.

He's not complaining.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Neither is she.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He steps out of the Wardrobe ready for Edwardian England and feels her gaze turn curious.

She's dressed up for the time period as well, mostly. The dress is nice – he assumes – but it makes her look unnaturally demure. Still, that's not the detail he needs to speak with her about.

"Your hair is going to cause a riot," he says, exaggerating so she'll listen.

She blinks once, takes a look at his head. "Yours already looks like one."

Shaking his head, he tries to get the fond smile off his face and go with a more serious expression. Tries and fails as he attempts to straighten his hair with his hand. He's still not used to it. "It's a status thing," he tells her. "You're going to be approached either way -" that's what always seems to happen these days and no, he isn't jealous "- but with your hair up, you won't bring them all down on yourself." She's obviously old enough to put her hair up. Doing otherwise would be a quick ticket to a difficult time tonight. His girl is not a harlot.

She grins at him, tongue touching her teeth. "Look at you, all concerned."

He hums at her indulgently, not caring so much about what she thinks about it, simply that she'll do it. "After our inevitable scandal? I think not." It's a precaution, the hair thing. She's respectable and they're whatever it is that they are and so there will be no rudeness or catastrophe, only a lovely night for her.

He's fairly certain she knows this is a date. It _was_ her idea.

"Scandal?" she asks, looking at him like she's not sure what he's offering.

"Holding hands in public?" he replies, the corners of his lips twisting upwards as she laughs.

The corset brings her laughter to a close quicker than usual, but she still has a joke at the end, one he'd rather she'd not say. "Yeah," she tells him, "'cause you're such a dirty old man."

She makes it both better and worse afterwards, smoothing his hair down herself and pressing a quick kiss to his lips. Normally, a playful mood like her current one would have her playing with his tie. Today, it's somewhat thwarted.

"What's this?" she asks, his alternative neckwear in her hand.

"Cravat," he says, "for the time period."

She rolls her eyes at him like she thinks he's being intentionally obtuse. "Yeah, I know what it is. Like your gray one better, s'all."

Somehow, he manages to get through the remainder of that conversation without making a mess of it, manages to reply and respond as if his brain is still on giving his girl a night at a ball. She goes away happy and he stays flabbergasted, running his metaphorical fingers over the entwinement to check for time leakage.

The gray one.

She likes the gray one.

She's never even _seen_ the gray one. He hasn't worn a cravat since his eighth body, not once. He'd had to go on quite the search to even find his blue one. He thinks of his current body, of his last one. There's no reason for her to think that he even owned a cravat, until today.

This is going to make things unfortunately interesting, isn't it?

.-.-.-.-.-.

It does.

.-.-.-.-.-.

This little incident with the jelly babies has been weird. Really, really weird.

Even by his standards? Weird.

And she still has no idea.

Sure, getting a bag of sweets, he can understand. And when the plastic yellow packet tears apart that way that plastic packets do, he can understand dumping the sweets into another bag. Makes perfect sense.

But does it have to be a white paper bag? Did there have to be a white paper bag search? Did she have to completely ignore the other twenty-eight hundred and forty-three possibilities available to her?

Because this is starting to freak him out.

"D'you want one?" she asks, evidently now watching him watch her instead of watching alien telly. He hadn't noticed the change, the redirection of her gaze.

He shakes his head and she pops one into her mouth, still looking at him curiously. Shifting on the couch in the third TARDIS den – the one with the really fuzzy carpet – he tries to think without looking like he's thinking. Staring at the telly is good for that.

"Are there any orange ones left?" he asks after a little while, glancing over at her.

She looks into the bag vaguely guiltily before displaying the last orange one, holding it between her teeth. Pulling it back into her mouth, she shrugs a sorry. "Nope."

A sudden grin touches his lips as he leans towards her. "Are you sure?"

When she looks into the bag again, he takes her chin and kisses her.

It's not as if they haven't snogged before, haven't got up to less than platonic behavior before, but the twists of this make him careful. He doesn't want her to choke, after all. He keeps slow, stays gentle, eases into her mouth with the care of an artist working with something precious and fragile. Precious, certainly. Her eyes fall shut and she makes a noise he hasn't actually heard before. That's not something he's considered, that she still has sounds that he doesn't know.

He wants to learn them all, decides to.

His tongue encounters his supposed goal, all sugar and starch and a bit in his way. Adjusting the angle of his head, he plays the game he's created, attempts to fish the sweet out of her mouth.

Somewhere between a wonderfully tactile exploration of his hair and her breasts brushing against his chest, she decides she's going to play along but not going to cooperate. They engage in wet and delicious battle, she defending and he on the attack. Finally, she gives in, surrenders the sweet.

He pulls his artificially flavoured prize into his mouth, breaks the kiss to look at her. Her cheek is flushed beneath his fingers, the delightful contrast of colour and temperature increasing as her heart pounds with a sluggish speed. She breathes in shakily through notably kissable lips and when she opens her eyes, she opens them halfway, such a devouring darkness contained within them.

Human arousal is a beautiful thing.

Or hers is, directed at him.

"We can get some more orange ones," she offers, looks dazed and uncertain at once. He hasn't been the instigator, hasn't deliberately started anything with her until now.

He hums, chewing as he mulls this over. "If you'd like," he decides, swallowing. "We don't need to, but-"

She interrupts him in a way he'd love to get used to.

.-.-.-.-.-.

"The Valiant Child," the Beast calls her, "who shall die in battle so very soon."

.-.-.-.-.-.

"It lied."

Please.

Let it have lied.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He leans on the entwinement, using it as ruthlessly as it uses him, both time and Time Lord struggling for their own fulfillment. If it tightens or stretches, here is danger: run. Don't do what makes it worse. Don't do what makes it complete.

Don't give up this guiding star, this landmark in time. So long as he has it, he knows how to move, knows how to avert the worst catastrophe of all, the loss of her.

It keeps her safe, gives him vague instruction instead of letting him wander lost. Even in this, she gives him purpose, gives him clarity and he needs that.

He needs her.

He needs her and he knows that someday, some point in time after the entwinement is fulfilled and after she's had a full and long life – and she _will_ have a full and long life – she'll die. He knows that. There's a clock in his head, _tick_, _tick_, _tick_ing its way through the moments, through every single second.

For that, he hates it. She'll die soon, sooner, even sooner now, simply because of the passage of time. The clock counts on, but it counts the moments in both directions.

This is how long she'll stay.

This is how long she's been with him already.

Both counts can't be high, a finite number of moments transferring constantly from the first category into the second. And he can't stop it, can't stop the loss of her if he is to keep the gain of her.

__

Tick, _tick_, _tick_, just waiting for a _tock_.

She's patched him together, his fantastic, precious girl. He'd shattered and she'd taken up the pieces, glued them back together. The glue won't last forever, can't last as long as him, so it has to be now. Now, while she's holding him together, he's got to complete the repairs she's started.

Otherwise, when she's gone – as she will be but not for a long time yet, a very long time – when she's gone, it all will have been pointless, a waste of her as he falls apart once more. He can't do that to her, can't put her through all of this and render her efforts useless.

He won't.

.-.-.-.-.-.

"Hey, can you teach me how to use fire extinguishers? Alien ones that don't come with the instructional label?"

"Sorry, what?"

"Y'know, the thing normal people put fires out with. That handy world-saving tool?"

"Um. Why?"

"Well, you use 'em all the time and I just thought . . ."

"That you should too?"

"Yeah."

". . . Okay."

.-.-.-.-.-.

It was only a matter of time. Really, he should have expected this, should have seen it coming ages back.

But it's not like it's his fault for not noticing. He's had a lot on his mind, a very large lot on his mind. Small wonder it snuck up on him like this. Completely unexpected and all.

His well-formulated and carefully thought-out argument is gasped into her mouth, rationale breaking apart into a muffled murmur. Warm weight presses down upon him, blankets him delightfully. His overcoat on the back of the couch, his suit jacket spilled onto the floor, her hands easily slip beneath his shirt, untuck the cloth to touch his chest.

She marvels at the coolness of his skin, lifts herself off him enough to explore one-handed. Her hair falls into his face and he brushes it back, brushes the dyed strands away from their kiss. Her hand travels between his hearts, a trailing touch that sends his hips grinding up into hers. Her legs on either side of his, her thighs squeeze his, hold him in a tempting preview of what is to come.

He tries to speak, tries to halt momentum with rambling words that even he knows make no sense. He's saying one thing and completely doing another, his hands cupping her curves, his hips rolling against hers insistently, body begging for entrance. She drags herself over him, finding friction in the cloth between them even as her skirt rides up.

"I need," he tries to say, "I need to- need to- Rose, I- please, let me, please."

"Yes," she pants into his ear, her hands lower between them now, tugging at his fly and touching him in the same motion. "Yes."

He cries out as she cups him, bucks into her hand in the desperate need for entry and still he hasn't penetrated, hasn't even been touched skin-to-skin. The sounds he makes are absurd; he's never been so helplessly vocal. Moans break into whimpers, groans into sighs, manly grunts into high-pitched squeaks. He can't stop it and she pushes him further, rewards each sound with the incentive for another.

"Rose, please, I- explain- need to-" He interrupts himself with a noise he's never made before, not with this mouth.

"Explain later," she tells him and provides a compelling argument as to why he should. Later sounds good, later sounds very, very good, fantastically good, but he knows better.

"Now," he insists, pushing at her shoulder, forcing her up with a will he doesn't truly have. "Now. You need to listen to – _oh_."

Change of angle, focus of pressure, grinding friction and heat heat heat . . .

His head pressing back into the couch cushion, he squeezes shut his eyes, gasps and tries to control the jerking motions of his hips. He's still pressing up into her, still straining for her.

She rises up and he nearly pulls her back down. The sides of her shins press into the outside of his thighs; her hands against his bare stomach keep him where he is. The skin beneath his hands is bare as well, her skirt giving him every opportunity to touch her legs.

"Talk fast," she tells him, panting and she kneels over him.

The noise he makes in reply is highly inarticulate.

Her fingers drum on his ribcage.

"Not helping," he informs her.

"Not explaining," she reminds him. "If you're not going to, then I'm just gonna have to . . ."

He groans, makes a grab at coherency as he forces himself to change his grip on her, move his hand from flesh to cloth. He can't let go, but he can't hold on. "Two things," he gasps. "Different biology. Not human, so obviously, it'd be different. Not that different – not that I've compared – not different in appearance, not so much, I think – oh, _gah_, stop that – behaviorally, that's the issue, that's it, yes, I, yes – can't stop, no – ahh – no stopping once, ah, penetration and, and – stop, _stop_, please, Rose, don't . . . don't . . . . Thank you."

His head lolls to the side, his body an impossible mixture of tension and relief. His hips still jerk, the motion completely beyond his control, this helpless begging and blatant display of need. His hands fall from her sides, slip from her waist to fall further, one hitting the couch cushion, one hanging off the piece of furniture entirely.

She lets him breathe, allows him this terrifying moment when all control is gone, allows him to endure it.

It might be the pain of waiting or it could simply be the scent of her arousal filling up his head. It might be a lot of things, a great deal of things he can't face at the moment and so he keeps his eyes closed. He breathes, tries to breathe. His respiratory bypass isn't helping, would probably startle her anyway if he used it now.

Murmuring his name, she touches his face, sounds more worried than frustrated, more concerned than annoyed. He nuzzles into her hand, leans into her touch. He's always done that. He's always done it and now there's no point in denying it, not after what she's just seen.

"Did I hurt you?" she asks, sounding scared. "Your different biology – did I . . . ?"

He shakes his head, rubs his cheek against her palm, still unable to speak with an unwavering voice. "No. No, you . . . . If we kept going, maybe. If I startled you and you pulled back . . . . I need to . . ."

"Explain," she finishes for him.

"Two things," he agrees. "You need to know both first."

Because consent is meaningless if it's not informed consent.

"If you're about to give me the alien sex talk," she tells him seriously, impatiently, "I've already had it."

He frowns up at her, going so far as to open his eyes to see. "No you haven't," he protests. "I don't care what your mother says, she's not qualified to give that talk. And if she is," he adds belatedly, "I'd really rather not know."

As far as mood dampers go, that one is highly effective. He might even say extremely.

She laughs at the look on his face, shakes her head. "Nope. Got my information from a very knowledgeable source. Ex-Time Agent, you know."

He stares at her. "You're kidding."

"'m not," she replies. "Got the safety talk, the manners talk, the how-not-to-react-to-unexpected-bits talk . . . . I think I've got enough talks."

"He gave you talks," he says blankly, mind inexplicably detached from the movements of her hips. "He taught you how to have sex with random aliens."

She shakes her head, her hair still mussed from his hands. "With a very specific random alien," she corrects, sending memories crashing through him.

Looking up at her like this – oh, Rassilon, no – she's herself already, simply unaware of it. The time is soon to come, very soon to come and after, his lifeline of the entwinement, his simple and easy guide to keeping her safe, after that, it's gone. He'll lose her after this, he knows he will, knows something will happen because he can't see it coming.

She sits on his thighs and he sits up, pushes himself up with his arms, pushes himself up and gathers her to him, her arms wrapping around him instantly. Enfolding her in his arms, he presses his face into the crook of her neck, gently kisses what bare skin he finds before simply resting his head on her shoulder.

"Doctor, what's wrong?" she asks him, tense and holding tightly to him and that's good. That's very good. He wants her to hold on, wants her to never let go. "Tell me." She cradles his head, keeps him where he is. "Whatever it is, we can-"

"I love you."

Her body tenses as she stops breathing and he has never felt more like a child, hiding his face and clinging for comfort. He tries to stop but he can't seem to, can't reclaim composure when she's rapidly becoming the woman he fell in love with twice. She should know him and love him and hold him and he wants that back, wants it so much that it physically pains him.

"What was that?" she asks softly, holding him as if realizing for the first time that he can break.

"I love you," he replies, attempting to sound irritable. It's an impossible task with her on his lap but then, he likes impossible. "Try to pay better attention."

"Okay," she breathes, relaxing into him, stroking his back soothingly. "Definitely paying attention from now on."

"Very good." Well, no, it's not, not until he gets the looked-for response out of her, but it'll have to do for now.

He lifts his head from her shoulder, pulls back enough to look at her.

She kisses him immediately. "Love you," she murmurs against his lips. "I love you, I love you, I love you."

"Rose Tyler," he says.

"Loves you," she adds with a smile, finishing his sentence.

"I like the sound of that," he admits, hands stroking her sides.

"You'd better," she replies, shifting on his lap, unfolding her legs to loosely wrap them around him. "You're sort of stuck with it."

He looks up at her, admiring the brightness of her eyes. "Am I now?"

"Yep," she replies simply, "'fraid so."

The corners of his mouth twitch. "I'll make the best of it, I suppose."

"You'll just have to manage, yeah," she agrees, tangling her hands in his hair.

"Oh, I can do that," he tells her seriously. "I can do anything, me."

She grins at him, arms around his neck, legs tightening around his waist. "Including sex with Rose Tyler?"

"With the utmost skill," he replies before continuing with equal seriousness and less arrogance. "Just not now."

That delightful shifting on his lap stops immediately. "Two things, you said," she reminds him, confused. "That was two things."

He blinks. "What? No, wait, that was- Well, yes, I suppose. Or no. Not, I mean. That was the first thing and the third thing, skipped over the second thing entirely."

She frowns. "If there were three things, why'd you only say two?"

"Meant to get to the third bit later," he admits. "But you know me, running at the mouth as always. Just sort of popped out."

"I'm glad," she says. "That it did. 'm glad."

There's an incomprehensible mix of emotion flowing between his hearts, tangling and clashing and merging together, taking elation and nerves and mashing them together, melding fear and relief, combining giddy euphoria with the utmost dread.

She watches his face, easily picks up on his mood. Not the nuances of it, never the nuances of it, not when he can't understand them himself. But enough. Always enough. "S'okay," she says gently, so very gently that he just might break anyway. "You can tell me."

He wants to ask for later, to promise he'll get around to it eventually but _eventually_ has begun to collide with _now_ and there's nothing else for him to do, nowhen for him to run to.

It takes him two attempts, but he says it.

"It's about the Time War," he breathes. "About how I survived." He closes his eyes, fights back the twisting sensation between his hearts. "And why," he adds quietly, even softer than before. His throat closes after that, refuses to allow even his babble to break through.

She holds him, holds herself against him, her heat sinking into him through her gentle embrace, gentle and secure. His arms tighten around her, pull her closer still.

She tries to speak, manages to tell him what she's told him before. "You've got me," she tells him, sounds so strangely sad, sounds as if she believes she should somehow be able to give him more than all that she is. "You've got me and 'm never gonna leave you. Love you too much."

"Yes," he answers, accepting a promise she can't fulfill. "That's the 'and why.'"

.-.-.-.-.-.

After, she sits back against the arm of the couch, sits there with her legs pulled up to her chest, sits there hugging her knees. "It's like . . ."

"Like what?" he asks, watching her face carefully, waiting for the play of emotion across her features to be decided one way or another. He hasn't told her everything, hasn't told her half of it, merely the outline. They met, they had a few adventures, she was there for him both before and after the War and then he'd had to find her. Couldn't have tried to stay away.

"It's like," she says again, trying to find the words he knows she'll find. "It's like a non-linear love story."

"Yes," he says quietly, "it is."

She bites her lip, stares at a point in spacetime that not even he can see. There might be flecks of gold in her eyes, but he's too afraid to look. She's quiet then, for a time.

"I'm not surprised," she says at last, sounding surprised.

He blinks at her.

"I mean, I should be, yeah?" she asks. "But 'm not. Not even confused," she adds, sounding confused.

This is not the reaction he expected, not any of the reactions he expected. And he's thought of millions of ways this might go. "Rose?"

"It makes sense," she says. "In my head, it just – it makes perfect sense. And I know it shouldn't, so I'm confused over that, but, yeah. I feel like . . . . I dunno." She bites her lip again, going somewhere in her mind where he can't follow. "S'like . . . like you told me about a dream I had. I already knew, I just . . . didn't know I knew, I guess."

"What do you dream about?" he asks, touching the entwinement to make sure it's still in the safety range. What he finds surprises him: it's the loosest around him it's ever been, giving him more leeway in his actions than he's had since he'd met her. "A recurring one, maybe?"

She thinks about it for a moment. She bites back a smile, telling him, "I've got this one where you're in velvet and on fire and I've gotta put you out. And then we laugh about it later."

This is said as if it couldn't possibly be important.

"Do you really?" he asks. "Is that why you asked for the fire extinguisher lessons?"

"Could be, yeah," she replies, just a touch sheepishly, a bit more like she's ready to laugh at herself.

"Ah," he says because, really, there's nothing else to say. He's tempted to ask if she ever dreams about having sex with him, but that could easily be taken in completely the wrong way. "What happens after that?" he asks instead, feigning innocence.

"Dunno, really," she replies, shrugging a little though her cheeks do flush. "Just goes the way dreams go, I guess."

Meaning that she wakes up before the good part?

He can't ask that, thinks about it instead.

"Hey." Moving forward to tap him on the arm, she's looking at him in a way she's never looked at him before, like he might actually be frail. "When are we going to do this? Go back into your timeline, I mean," she clarifies, part of her mind still obviously on intercourse of the nonverbal kind.

He stares at her. "You want to? Just like that." Obviously, he's left out too many of the sketchy details. "Rose, you don't-"

Her finger is soft and firm against his lips. "You needed a hand to hold, yeah? Okay, I can do that."

"Rose-"

"I _want_ to do it," she adds. "I mean, I've thought about it – different, but sort of – but I figured there'd be a paradox involved or something. But if it turns out I can be there for you, I'm gonna be an' -"

"We had sex."

There is a short moment as she processes this. "Okay," she says. "Now I _really_ want t' do this."

"Rose! This isn't a joke," he stresses. "It's a paradox waiting to happen, self-fulfillment and entwinement all rolled together."

"I know, I get that," she tells him patiently. "It's serious. What's entwinement?"

"Two or more timelines twisting together to the point where the destruction or violation of one at a certain period of time would result in destruction or violation of the other," he rattles off.

She processes this as well. "So if I don't go and visit younger you, your timeline implodes or something?"

"More or less," he admits.

"And then mine goes the same way from association?" she asks.

"Quite possibly," he agrees.

"Well," she says, sounding completely serious at last, "I think I get why you're acting like this is kinda skeevy. Y'know, besides the age gap and the species thing and all that." This list is said as if it happens to be utterly unimportant and truly makes him wonder about what goes on inside of her brain. She bites her lip and then asks, "When this started, how did you think it would end?"

He rubs the back of his head, mulling it over. "Didn't know it was starting, actually. After I caught on, I mostly assumed I'd sort of stumble into it and have it work out that way."

"Okay," she says, leaning towards him. "I'm gonna ask you a question. There's two options you can pick from and you've gotta pick one."

He nods because he owes her that much.

"You risking a fatal paradox to send me back in time for a shag, or me doing whatever I have to do to be there for my best mate," she says. "One's likely, one's not. Your pick."

"Rose," he says softly.

She kisses him, soft and tender and everything he doesn't deserve. "Don't be daft."

"Rose."

"And don't you dare go off on one of your guilt trips or something. 'Cause it's my idea an' you just had to remind me, s'all," she tells him, hugging him from the side. "Just had to tell me it was possible."

"_Rose_."

She looks up at him, lets him speak. "Yeah?"

"Thank you," he tells her and pulls her tight against him, his fantastic, precious girl.

.-.-.-.-.-.

They stay like that for quite a while.

.-.-.-.-.-.

"Okay, so we had the first thing, the second thing and the third thing – not in that order - but we never got around to the fourth thing," she informs him.

He frowns, puzzling it over. "What fourth thing?"

She answers him simply: "Sex."

"Now?"

A nod. "Yeah."

"Here?"

"Bed?" she asks.

"Yours," he insists.

They grin at one another and she takes his hand. "Let's."

.-.-.-.-.-.

Her bed is a little too small and far too pink but she's discovering her audacity and he won't ever say no. After what he's told her, he's still amazed that she's saying yes.

She's yet to climb on top of him like it's her accustomed place, yet to undress him like it's her right. Of course, he technically has yet to see her naked, so it's not like he can talk.

She gropes his bum a bit and while he'll be first in line to agree that this is yet another wonderful location for hand-placing, he likes other things more, needs her to touch him differently if he's going to touch her the way he's waited to. He catches her hands, presses her palms to the sides of his face. Fingertips creep into his hair and he readjusts her grip on him, murmurs something against her lips about her staying like this, just for a little while. It's as if his skin is on fire, feels like it, feels like this might work.

She arches up to fit her body against him, all warm and soft and when he slips his hands under her top, presses them against the skin of her back, when he does that, she gasps into his mouth and arches further, moves without intent, only reaction. She's still not used to it, still unaccustomed to the temperature of his body. She's not used to it, but she doesn't pull away, only holds on tighter, squirms against him.

His hips slam her down, grind against hers mercilessly and her answering cry fails to be one of complaint. Her hands leave his face, clutch at his shirt, his back, and he nearly forgets what he has planned. He pants into her neck, moves his hands from her back to her stomach and when she gasps, it's not from cold.

He's ready, he decides. Nuzzling as he goes, he moves down her body, kisses her skin where her top has risen up. It occurs to him that he should really impress her now. He's going to look like such a clumsy git when he's younger.

He pulls down her skirt as he flicks his tongue into her navel, tastes her there because he can. Realizing his intent, she whimpers, a weakly sighed expletive encouraging him.

He chuckles, pressing an open-mouthed kiss to her stomach as he rids her of her knickers as well, loving the way she moves beneath him to help. The side of his face against her skin, he nuzzles her belly in a pointedly languid counterpoint to her struggling legs, twisting hips.

It's her turn to make inarticulate noises, to writhe deliciously beneath him, the scent of her arousal strengthening the further down he goes. He wants very much to lick and taste and suck and so he does.

A keening cry meets his ears as hands tangle in his hair, push his head down in encouragement. Chuckling entirely on purpose, lips tugging, tongue pressing, stroking, flicking, he gathers up the taste of her, can't imagine why he's never done this before.

And the _sounds_ she makes, the mewling whimper as he pauses, the groan when he presses there or licks here, the gasp as he rubs his sideburns against the inside of her thighs. But best of all, best of all sounds she has ever made, best of all is his name falling from her lips, pulled from her as he thrusts his tongue into her core.

He smirks and lets her feel it, presses his mouth to her in a wet and intimate kiss, drinking in the scent of her. Hot fingers pull at his hair, touch his neck. He keeps his hands on her, keeps his hands warm with her heat. "Rose," he murmurs, growls her name into her, plays with the syllable with lips and tongue, caressing her with it. "Rose, Rose, Rose . . ."

She gasps and jerks and squirms and it's beautiful, she's beautiful, glorious, exquisite. His. She's his. Now and always, for the rest of his life, she'll be his.

Sucking, licking, tasting, he lays claim with tongue and lips and teeth. He gauges her reactions, takes note of her sounds as he presses his tongue flat or strokes with the tip, learns her responses and uses them mercilessly against her. She presses into his mouth, her hips bucking up against him, and he moans for her, against her, into her, long and low and loud and she moans to match.

He tastes her orgasm and immediately decides that she should have another.

After he's done with that – for a little while, perhaps – he sits up to look at her, lying limp and languid before him with the perfect little smile, at once content and dazed. As she watches, he wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, licks it clean. Breathing out a shuddering sigh, she reaches for him and he climbs over her, blanketing her with his body, his precious girl.

Her arms wrap around him, hold him weakly. "You're still completely dressed," she tells him, points out this important fact.

"Yep," he tells her, popping the "p" close to her ear. "Actually, no. Started with just the shirt. Took my socks and trainers off, too."

"Yeah, I saw an' . . ." She closes her eyes, tightens her grip on him. "Oh god."

"What?" he asks, not entirely sure of this reaction.

"Death by shagging," she replies.

"Long, slow, drawn-out death by shagging," he agrees.

She giggles, petting his hair. "Life's overrated." Their legs twine together, hers bare, his covered.

He snickers like the arrogant madman he is. "I'm rather fond of it at the moment," he informs her seriously, rocking his hips against hers.

She groans, eyes squeezing shut. "G- gimme a mo'?"

He's already given her years, but would give her decades if she asked him, if she could hold them within her life span. "Yes," he replies. "As long as you want."

"Want now, need later," she answers and he's back to snickering.

"Well then," he says.

"Yeah," she breathes.

He is very, _very_ pleased with himself.

Seeing a perfect opportunity for cuddling, he seizes upon it, rolling off her to gather her against him. She sighs, pressing back into him, and her hand covers his encouragingly when it slips beneath her top.

She trembles, just a little, but her voice is remarkably steady as she asks, "About that entwinement thing . . ."

Ah, there it is. The not-making-sense-in-bed. "Mm?"

"How's it work?" she asks him snuggling into him contentedly, pressing her shapely little bum against a not-so-content piece of him. He bites back a groan and it comes out like a growl instead.

She pulls his arm tight around her and pushes back even more firmly.

"How's it work?" she prompts him again. "After the loop is closed or whatever – the paradox prevented – what happens?"

"It-" His breath hitches as she shifts. "It stops being dangerous. Obviously, if the crucial period of time is attacked or altered, there would be problems, ah . . ."

"Obviously," she agrees, squeezing her thighs tight around the leg he's pushed between hers. She's hot and burning and he can smell her on him, can smell him on her. "But once it's complete, there shouldn't be a problem, normally?"

He grinds into her rear, squeezes her breast the way he knows she likes it. "No," he admits, sounding more strained than he would like. "But . . ."

"But what?" she asks, turning her head for a look at his eyes, for the kiss he wants to give her.

"It keeps you safe," he murmurs to her lips. "I can feel it – when it's in danger of not coming to pass, I can feel it . . . correct it." He's depended on it for as long as he's known her name, has had to depend on it. "Protect you."

She releases his leg to roll over, to press against him chest-to-chest. "S'okay," she tells him.

"I'll lose you," he tries to explain. "If it's gone-"

"You'll think of something," she interrupts, interrupts with a kiss. "You're brilliant, after all."

"Completely genius," he agrees, slipping his hand around to her back, fumbling one-handedly with the catch of her bra.

They snog a bit, sitting up enough for him to return her to her proper state – namely, naked and in his lap. She toys at his tie, loosens the knot slowly. A thought striking him, he breaks the kiss to watch her face, his hands cupping her shoulder blades.

"S'like," she says slowly, says and then trails off, a blush crossing her features.

"Like what?" he asks her, touching her face, already knowing the answer.

"S'like unwrapping a present," she says for the first time, says it quietly and without looking him in the eye, embarrassed.

"Mm," he replies, brushing his lips against hers, his hand in her hair. "Yours."

It's a statement, not an offer, but she responds as if it were, as if he'd added something about it being a limited time only deal, as if he might snatch back the words. He is very quickly rendered shirtless, her clever fingers working through tie and buttons as her legs wrap about his waist, hold him where he'd never try to leave.

"Rose," he says, cries, reminds her, presses up and into her hand, her hot little hand cupping him through cloth.

"Penetrate, flare, climax, withdraw," she repeats, pants out the carefully explained mantra. "No stopping until the end. No thrusting."

"I'm," he tries to say, both of them fumbling for his zipper. "I – colder than – body heat, and, you, ah, hot and, and, yes. Yes." Both straining to rise up enough for the act, they shove his pants and trousers down, the cloth getting caught mid-thigh and giving him a rush of sexual déjà vu, the rising memory of his first blowjob and his legs restrained. "Oh Rose."

He brushes against her opening, her weight pressing down on him as she shifts and gasps and he has to fight not to bite down on her shoulder, not to mark her before it's time. "Warm enough," she decides quickly and takes him inside.

There are words for this, he thinks. Words like homecoming and completion and many other things he's never believed in, never cared to believe in until he had her to believe in as well.

He flares and he's almost braced for it, almost prepared for the way they don't interlock, not completely, for the way he clutches at her from the inside and still cannot hold on. She lets out a shriek that turns into a low moan, nearly pulls up and pull back but stops, stops at his cry and comes back down, returns to him and _the Shorts of Rassilon_, that _hurt_.

Her arms tighten around his neck as he grips her by the waist, hands digging into her hips. "Did I, oh god, did I?" she asks and this is it, this is why he made sure she came before, why he hopes she'll remember the start and not the finish.

He shakes his head, a lie. "No," he pants, "no, good, like this, like, yes, this."

They fumble into it and she catches on quickly, such a fast learner, his girl, his, his his his, his lover now, yes, his lover. To love and be loved by; to shag and be shagged by. His his his. He finds that rhythm they hold between them, adapts it for this body, new and untested and hers.

He grinds up into her and she rocks her hips, rolls them, clenches, nearly holds him as tightly as he needs. "Please," she gasps into his shoulder. "Please, oh god, I, please."

"Rose, Rose Tyler," he replies, clutching her to him.

And then that's her mouth, her mouth on his shoulder, biting and sucking, and oh yes, this is going to leave a mark, her mark, her claim and yes. Yes.

They shudder together and he follows her into completion, still sighing her name.

.-.-.-.-.-.

"Can we go now?" she asks one day, sitting on the jump seat as he tinkers beneath the console.

He shakes his head even though she can't see it with him down where he is. "There's still time."

"I know."

Her voice draws him up, brings him around to her side of the console. He leans back against it, ignoring the levers digging into him as he crosses his arms. ". . . You're sure, then?"

"Yeah," she replies, nodding, then gives him a small smile. "Can't keep your reality hanging in the balance, now, can I?"

He shrugs fondly. "I don't mind."

"I do."

He looks down, sees her feet as she moves to stand before him, to reach for the contact he'll always give her.

"It's okay," she tells him, holding his hands, one in each of hers. Their arms form a circle between them and his lips quirk at the symbolism. "I'll come back to you."

"I know," he says, not doubting it.

She always has.


End file.
